Love – review

With a musical score supplied by the US band Angels & Airwaves, this sci-fi meditation from 29-year-old debutant director William Eubank is a technically accomplished but stiflingly reverential homage to Stanley Kubrick. It often seems like an 80-minute pop video with a 2001 gimmick. There's a "pre-history" sequence: not apes, but soldiers in the US civil war who make a strange discovery. Then we rocket forward centuries to a lone spaceman, Captain Lee Miller (Gunner Wright), in a cramped craft, who receives a disturbingly curt message from Houston. He's on his own. Panic is succeeded by existential horror and hallucinations that somehow trigger a kind of leap to a new consciousness, and we loop in the civil–war discovery. Technically proficient, good-looking – but what's the point?