★★★★           By Pavita Millimuff               August 28, 2089

Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” a statement often taken to be among the scariest to come out of Earth’s philosophy. But an even more disconcerting idea lies in the notion that the abyss may offer no response whatsoever. No matter how hard we strain our eyes, no matter how loudly we shout into the infinite black, nothing ever comes back to us. This is the experience of the crew of the Argus 7 in Guardians of Silence, the film adaptation of Irving Kangol’s book of the same name.

I wasn’t yet born when the Crunk Signals started, but my father was. He tells me there was an unparalleled excitement at the time, that we had finally found what we thought was indubitable proof of extrasolar intelligence. He tells me he remembers watching the launch of the first Argus mission, thinking that we were only the length of a trip to Neptune away from making first contact, that he was lucky enough to see it in his lifetime. Now that optimism lies only in the tales those people of my father’s generation tell their children and grandchildren about their own youth. For the rest of us, Argus is an afterthought, a relic of a time whose ambition only highlights our present floundering, the manifestation of Einstein’s definition of insanity. But those ships are still out there, looking and listening carefully for anyone who answers back.

Kangol’s book was a recounting of his own experiences on Argus 7, which he signed up for soon after his service in the Saturnian War. The book’s grim depiction of the loneliness and existential angst dominating the mission led to wide praise, with the movie rights soon after being sold to Jackrabbit Pictures, resulting in this film. At the helm is veteran director Rex Asparaghous, whose reliable hand builds for the film a quiet, heavy atmosphere. The film turns the book’s episodic ramblings, part technical and part philosophical, into a more traditional narrative, following the six-person crew over one of the five years on their mission as they struggle to maintain sanity and faith against the nothingness into which they peer.

The members of the crew whom we follow over the course of the film are all there for different reasons, and have different attitudes on their perpetual failure to pick up the slightest sign of another intelligence. Leading the mission is Wanda, played by Michelle Styx-Pickner, an astrophysicist there more out of a sense of duty than hope. She’s given up all illusions about finding extrasolar life, but still commits to the work because it’s her job. Also there is idealistic Lila (Adelaide Yonko), who still has real hope in the mission, the intense Grant (Eric Broggins II), who is implied to have come to Argus fleeing some danger on Earth, the soft-spoken Miles (Keith Schlimp), who found the Argus mission the only place that would accept him after being disowned by his family, the Martian Cassandra (Silvia Androphes), a spiteful youth who just wanted to get as far away from her family as possible, and Morris (Otto DeGoulia), the character most resembling Kangol, a war veteran seared by trauma who just wants some peace and quiet.

This is a film that doesn’t move so much as it drifts, that lives in negative space. In many scenes, there is no dramatic action, only shots of crew members going about their aimless jobs as their faces become glazed over with numbness. In much of the film’s time, we focus on tiny interactions, tasks and bickerings, but its most poignant moments come when Asparaghous pulls us out from the tiny to the vast in extreme long shots of the Argus against the blackness of space, shots where the ship is nearly indiscernible from that blackness. In staring into the nothingness for so long, they have become a part of it.

This description may elicit an image of a plodding, eventless film – Jeanne Dielman in space, as it were. Certainly the film aims to give that feeling to the audience, but it does not aim to be boring, instead packing that sparse crawl to nowhere with enough existential anxiety to make one collapse. When the crew is searching for another intelligent lifeform, but there are none to find, the only life left to search for and discover, the only thing that reflects back out of the nothing, is themselves. With nothing else to look at, they can only search deep within their own souls for the answers they do not find in the deep reaches of space. They question their identity, their purpose, their value, until these anxieties eventually explode in a couple riveting scenes near the end of the film.            

The Argus missions may have begun as our frontier, the ambitious final step in our first triumphant contact with the rest of the galaxy, but decades later they have come to represent our forgotten. They are the homes of outcasts, refugees, and those crazy enough to still believe in a greater purpose. They have gone from a monument to where we were going to a buried capsule of what we would rather not remember. Guardians of Silence forces us to dig up that capsule, not to reinvigorate the spirit it once represented, but instead to make us face what we have since become. When the abyss offers nothing back to us, we ought to examine why we keep staring.