Butler's Cinema Scene

“SETTLERS” My rating: B-

103 minutes | No MPAA rating

Mankind possesses the intelligence to travel to the stars. But we’ll never outrun the dark side of human nature.

That’s the unvarnished, uncomfortable message behind “Settlers,” the debut feature of writer/director Wyatt Rockefeller (and, yes, he’s a member of that Rockefeller clan).

With a title like this you expect a frontier drama with sodbusters, outlaws and a hostile environment. And in fact Rockefeller has given us what is essentially a Western,,,a Western set on Mars.

Nine-year-old Remmy (Brooklynn Prince, the knockout young star of “The Florida Project”) lives with her parents Reza (Johnny Lee Miller)and Ilsa (Sofia Boutella) on a Martian farmstead. It’s a hostile environment with limited resources (not even a breathable atmosphere…the secret behind their ability to survive will be revealed later); the family apparently raises just enough greenhouse veggies and food animals to stay alive.

No neighbors. No communication with the rest of the Mars, much less with faraway Earth.

Little Remmy is curious about her home planet, but Mom and Dad are parsimonious with details. She asks her father if he’s ever seen certain wild animals; he replies that he has not, and that before he left Earth about the only animals he saw were dogs.

Evidently humankind has so fouled up its birthplace that it is now all but uninhabitable. Moreover, Martian society — whatever it might once have been — has been reduced to outlawry and Darwinian self preservation.

So it’s a tough life for a curious little girl. Happily she discovers in a shed a boxy little robot she dubs Steve; Remmy trains him as if he were a pet.

Things get ugly when the three family members awaken one day to find that someone has scrawled “LEAVE” on their picture windows in what appears to be blood.

Enter Jerry (Ismael Cruz Cordova), who grew up on the farm and now wants to reclaim it after an absence of many years. Apparently Reza and Ilsa moved onto the property under somewhat less than legal circumstances.

Slow-bubbling sexual intimidation is a big part of “Settlers'” emotional palette. Despite an initial display of violence, Jerry seems a reasonably sane, even sympathetic sort. But as time passes primal urges do a number on him; initially they are directed at Ilsa and, after the passage of many years, at Remmy (played as a young adult by Nell Tiger Free).

“Settlers” feels less like a fully realized drama than as an outline for said drama. Rockefeller explains very little, leaving it up to the viewer to glean little nuggets of information with which to build a bigger picture of human life in the late 21st century.

Moreover he’s anti-melodramatic to a fault. No well-made tale here.

But when it comes to envisioning and creating a tangible world, “Setters” is terrifically seducive. Not a little of the film’s success lies with cinematographer Willie New and production designer Noam Piper, who create an utterly believable enclave of human effort in a hostile landscape (the production was shot mostly in a rocky desert area of South Africa).

| Robert W. Butler