Tides
Sea of greed
Throughout my life I have observed that science fiction films present an increasingly pessimistic vision. Of course, technological advances are always present, sophisticated and powerful, but human nature seems to remain the same or worse than in nowadays. This is also a characteristic shown in the Swiss-German film “Tides” (aka “The Colony”, GER/CH, 2021).
In an unspecified future time, we discover that Earth was razed by its own inhabitants through wars, climate change and pandemics. A group of powerful managed to escape to the planet Kepler 209, leaving behind a shattered world invaded by the waters resulting from global warming. A large number of weather stations was left to monitor environmental conditions.
When one of these stations issues the information they expected, a mission called Ulysses is sent to Earth to investigate whether there were conditions for return. Although was confirmed that they had reached Earth, there was no further news of the astronauts.
A few years later, a new Ulysses mission is sent to Earth. This time among the three participants is Louise Blake (Nora Arnezeder), daughter of one of the astronauts of the first mission. During the re-entry process, the ship suffers serious problems and one of the astronauts dies and another, Tucker (Sope Dirisu), is heavily injured in the legs.
Blake goes out to do a reconnaissance, and finds a desolate world, an immense sand landscape that in a few hours would be covered by the tide. She seeks not only signs of life on Earth but also changes in her own organism, as radiation on Kepler 209 has made people sterile.
It doesn’t take long for Blake and Tucker to be captured by a group of nomads, who destroy the ship and disable any kind of communication. Tucker’s condition gets worse and he decides to kill himself because he thinks he’s only going to harm Blake and the mission.
Soon the nomads are attacked by others. The attackers collect children and adults, indistinctly, while Blake watches everything without knowing what’s really going on. A girl, Maila (Bella Bading), with whom she had interacted, is also kidnapped, and when her mother Narvik (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) discovers, she decides to pursue the attackers.
Blake follows her, and when they reach the boat with the prisoners, she infiltrates in among them. The boat goes to a place with many abandoned ships, and in one of them she discovers that an organized group makes the adults slaves and keeps the girls apart.
To Blake’s surprise, she discovers that the group’s leader is Gibson (Iain Glen), a friend of her father’s and participant in the first Ulysses mission. Gibson says that as soon as they arrived on Earth the group was attacked by the Muds (name of the nomads) and that her father had not survived.
Gradually, Blake discovers new facets of the story. She learns that her father (Sebastian Roché) had not died, but had joined the Muds to prevent the arrival of Kepler’s inhabitants, including her. She gets very angry with her father, but other events will make her doubt Gibson’s intentions and take decisions by herself.
This movie has some oddities Despite being a Swiss-German production, it is spoken in English and has a multinational cast. Nora Arnezeder is French, Sarah-Sophie Boussnina Danish, Iain Glen Scottish and Sebastian Roché French. Director Tim Fehlbaum is Swiss and screenwriter Mariko Minoguchi is German.
There is some confusion regarding the title of the film, because although in most countries it is “Tides”, in some places it is referred to as “The Colony”. I think “Tides” combines more with the film’s environment in a coastal area with constant fog. One of the highlights of the film is the location, an old area of open mines in Welzow, Germany.
Despite the theme already well explored, this film escapes a bit of the popular “space opera”, bringing a pessimistic view of our future, which if we look coldly seems very likely to happen. After all, even with all the warnings about the degradation of the environment, man’s greed keeps talking louder, and the situation is always getting worse. What people need to remember is that there is no other planet to escape. Good or bad, we will have to live here for a long time!