★★½              By Pavita Millimuff                September 1, 2090

The film begins as a documentary. The first thing we hear are news broadcasts, ones that were actually sent out across the Galilean Moons, breaking the story of the war, of the first strike by Earth against Ananke. We see real footage of missiles assaulting lunar shields and crowds rushing the spaceports to find a safe haven. Then we suddenly switch to a single-camera scene shot on a set of a man rushing through the streets trying to reach his children at their daycare amidst the chaos. The film does not so much as cut to black to signal the shift from real footage to fictionalized depiction; in fact it is edited so as to make the two indistinguishable. The scene goes on with handheld long takes following the father through the streets, emulating the found footage techniques of Cloverfield or INSANE Freakout at Thunberg Square (Gone Wrong!) (Gone Tiananmen!). The scene climaxes with the family, consisting of the father, his wife, her sister, and their two daughters hitching a ride off-world with a neighbor while the legions of Earth march through the streets, burn a palladium palace, and at last conduct a mass public execution. This part of the scene is pure fiction; no journalist anyone at Pondering Cosmo knows has a shred of evidence that Earth has been executing Galileans on captured moons and asteroids. But following the film’s depiction of that very thing, it cuts back to real footage of a burning city on Hermippe. This is what is to be found in The Road to Pallas: a film that switches far too comfortably back and forth between documenting the war as it really occurs, depicting it in a fictionalized but reasonable manner, and engaging in total confabulation.

Being a film produced on Io trying to sell its own narrative of the war that Io and its fellow moons are engaged in with Earth right now, this is obviously not a film that’s easy to come by on Earth. Hence the reason why I am now stationed not in my usual home of Toledo but a ship at an undisclosed location somewhere between Earth and Mars, having received this film on a hard drive smuggled inside a papier-mâché bust of Benito Mussolini. I go to all this work and risk my life traveling on an unprotected ship in open space in the midst of an interplanetary war because I and those who sign my checks believe that it is important to document the way that the participants in a historical event try to depict it in their media, and that our readers, both those on Earth and across the solar system, deserve to know how the Galileans frame the war and have that work considered seriously. As an added personal benefit, doing this dangerous mission instead of staying home in relative safety spared me the indignity my colleague Z.P. Kibbleworth had to endure: that of having my return to work in the face of the war be marked by reviewing a Rizz Chaddington film.

The Road to Pallas is directed by Aldous Quan, one of the more prominent Ionian filmmakers who worked in Hollywood for about fifteen years, producing such hits as 2074’s When the Parakeets Strike. He joins forces with screenwriter Nadia Lambert-Okogie and cinematographer Wendell V. Batista to make an all-star team of the best talent the small film sector of the Galilean Moons has to offer. The film sells itself as being the real story of the Farkhad family and their journey across the war zone around Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt towards the refugee haven of Pallas. The “real story” bit is played up heavily in the film, with the Farkhad family members playing themselves and the film purporting to shoot on many real war-torn locations as little as a week after battles were fought there, all things the film takes great care to mention in opening text. To this extent, the film is not lying: it does use some real footage, real locations, and real people. But a collection of true things does not necessarily produce truthfulness in the whole, and there are quite a lot of half-truths and outright lies that the film tries to sneak through under the pretense of being realist.

What the film is most eager to assert is the unchecked aggression of Earth in the war and the helplessness of the Galileans who are trying to survive amidst all of it. There is plenty of truth to this, of course. War is war. Atrocities are bound to be perpetrated and innocent people are bound to get hurt and die in large numbers. And in this particular instance, it is true that Earth has been prioritizing sending a message to the Galilean Moons with continuous strikes and have not been particularly careful about keeping civilians out of harm’s way. But the movie is deliberately selective with what it decides to show, it lingers on scenes of wrecked stations and searches for bodies among ruins, and augments the real images it uses with computer-generated set extensions to make the carnage appear many times greater than it actually was. The path of the Farkhad family in their journey throughout the film clearly deviates from the actual path they took, here specifically designed to go through all the places the war has hit the hardest against any notion of geographic consistency. It depicts the Galilean military force DOGMA as almost entirely a humanitarian organization and does not acknowledge the repeated missiles fired at Earth and its satellite stations that have caused comparable strife. Much of what the film shows is real, but in the choices of which real things it shows and which it does not, it skews the picture of the war heavily.

Now, the film can plausibly defend itself from charges of untruthfulness by appealing to the selective nature of art. Of course there are more sides to the war than just what the film shows us, this is the case with any film about anything. No work of art can ever be a truly comprehensive account of its subject, and insofar as any movie strives to be about something, it has to pick and choose what it shows to create the most cohesive version of the story it wants to tell. The story this film wants to tell is about the suffering and torment this war has wreaked on the Galileans, and it makes creative choices to tell that story as effectively as it can. This does not preclude there being a greater story to the war, theaters of action and political circumstances present but not addressed by the film. Those things were simply not the focus of this film, and so did not need to be included.

This argument has some merit, but the film seems keen to stretch the creative liberties involved in telling a real story as far as it possibly can while still keeping its badge of realism. Were the film presented plainly as a fictionalized account of the war, a mythic odyssey set in a current event, its factual manipulations could be more forgiven. But the film absolutely tries to sell itself as a document of the war, seeking to remind us again and again that this is all real, that it happened just like this. The film pulls a bait-and-switch, introducing itself as pure documentary and then veering into its own fictionalized narrative, hoping the audience does not notice. And then there are the outright fabrications, scenes like the mass execution mentioned above or the stealing of children from their families on Eurydome that have no basis in any documented fact. These aspects of the film kill any remaining argument one can make of it being an authentic representation of the war.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that cinema is truth 24 frames per second, but the cinema is equally built on lies. Every film, even the most austere pieces of direct cinema, involve some sort of manipulation in order to capture the world in an image. The hope is that with the right kind of manipulations, with the right images of the right things arranged in the right way, we can uncover a truth deeper than the one immediate to our senses. In cinema false, staged things become true in a deep sense. But the converse is also applicable. True, real things captured by a camera can be made false in a deep sense by the same kind of manipulations. Cinema can obscure by the same hand with which it reveals. The Road to Pallas is a film that uses the surface truths of cinema, the ones Godard talks about, to construct a kingdom filled with lies. Not everything the film wishes to claim about the war is false, but this is part of the problem. In such blatant pieces of propaganda as Earth’s Sergeant Erectus, we understand that we should take nothing we see at face value, that the film is transparently engaging in make-believe in order to convey something deeper it believes to be true. But The Road to Pallas tries to trick us. It engages in the same kind of falsehoods as Sergeant Erectus, or any fiction film, but sprinkled with just enough honest truth to try to us trust the film blindly. It is not actually concerned with making us believe facts about the war, but rather destroying the distinction between factual truths and thematic, ideological ones. In a state of war, such an interchangeability is a remarkably dangerous thing.