ometime in the far future, when humanity is still based on Earth but has travelled extensively in the stars, a young woman named Jessica Richmond ventures to the frontier in search of her missing brother Jared, who vanished during explorations of his own.
Determined to find him, supporting herself with various temporary freight-hauling jobs, Jessica sends regular chatty reports of her progress to her niece, Jared's daughter, Katie. The reports, which take the form of five-minute monologues Jessica delivers directly to the camera, reveal her to be a determined young woman who, despite her clear love for her brother and niece, is nevertheless traumatized and alienated by tragedies in her past. She is also increasingly prone to despair, as the frustrations of her quest begin to get the better of her. Ultimately, she finds that her brother has run into a very strange phenomenon indeed ... one that terrifies her. Will it prove to be as frightening as she believes, when she takes a closer look? And even if she does find what she’s looking for, will that finally put her demons to rest?
Back home, paralleling this story, Katie has enrolled in the Academy, intent on following her wayward dad and aunt to the stars. Her own return mail, following the same format as her beloved aunt's, reveals her as a bright, cheerful and naive young lady, who trusts in Jessica to complete her quest successfully. But betrayal, of a deeply intimate kind, lies in her immediate future ... an event which soon leaves her as lost and alienated as her aunt. By the time Katie reaches the stars herself, her messages can only echo her aunt’s lament that she’ll never go home again. Maybe, she says, things will be better once they meet up.
One of these women will find what they’re both looking for. The other won’t live to see it.
A movie made of many monologues
Letters from Orion is a bold, if less than successful, experiment. It’s a complete science-fiction movie produced on video for less than a thousand dollars, and eschewing sets and special effects by instead taking the form of 12 short monologues delivered directly to the camera in talking-head shots. The production values are limited to occasional bursts of static and the colorful NASA observatory photographs which provide a background for the actors. Whether these images are supposed to be accurate representations of the view out their respective windows, or just handy backgrounds for their respective video presentations, is never quite said. The story is told entirely through the words the actors speak and the emotions they manage to convey.
The performances range from adequate to good. Rachel Werkman, playing Aunt Jessica, devotes a lot of effort to appearing animated, and she’s very effective in the emotional scenes, even if she strains while delivering the goopier flights of rhetoric. Annemarie Sheets, playing Katie, captures her character’s initial naivete and subsequent disillusionment with finely tuned control of her personal demeanor. Arand Sarwate, playing Captain Sanjanon, is given a bit too much to say, given his character’s supporting role, but he, too, handles himself well. As competent actors, they cannot be faulted if they fail to carry a format that would tax brilliant ones.
Writer-director Kurt Lancaster deserves credit for choosing a character-based story, whose participants spend as much time talking about their own personal regrets as they do facing the challenges of their shared quest. He does a decent job representing the frontier as a place of physical and emotional isolation. But the head shots are static, the story flirts with (and for long stretches exceeds) the borders of tedium, and his writing has an unfortunate tendency to give these characters bursts of poetic eloquence that, here, interfere with the illusion that these are people communicating with each other and not just actors struggling to sound natural reading a script. Effective as the story gets when the two main characters discuss their respective traumas, all their monologues are blighted by passages where the characters say too much, in too purple a shade. It’s hard, for instance, not to feel jolted out of the story the second or third time Aunt Jessica refers to something touching her soul.
Though short for a full-length movie (65 minutes), Letters from Orion is hard to view in one sitting. The static format is wearying. However, it is intended to be viewed on the Web, by audiences who can watch the various chapters individually. Audiences who experience it in smaller bites may be able to enjoy it for its considerable virtues, rather than watch the whole thing all at once and feel the cumulative impact of its equally significant flaws.
