Space oddity: "Love"

Have you ever wondered what John Carter might have looked and played like if it had been funded by an American alt-rock collective, rather than an overreaching Hollywood studio? (A lone wag pipes up: "no", before conceding "probably better than the original".) Love, a feature collaboration between the group Angels & Airwaves (nope, me neither) and their long-time promo director William Eubank, sets out two suddenly familiar stories: first, a prologue in which a lieutenant in the Civil War is sent to investigate a mysterious apparition in the middle of nowhere, then the tale of a lonely astronaut on the International Space Station, who's reached the point where isolation is beginning to get the better of him. Interwoven with this latter strand are (staged) talking heads with individuals reflecting upon our need for connection - thus leading the viewer, in turn, to wonder how all of the above might relate.

Tinkering with a modest budget in the L.A. equivalent of a garage and back garden, Eubank has a visual style locked down: crafting cosmoses and battlefields you buy completely, Love is - after Gareth Edwards' Monsters - another demonstration of the effects that can be achieved these days with a little bit of money, and a whole lot more care and attention. The soundscape, too, is rarely less than striking, the A&A boys summoning forth the kind of atmospheric audio that makes a match with those moments when we're given cause to ponder the space that exists between us. In fact, Love only starts to wear thin as a sustained piece of storytelling: if John Carter finally had too much going on, Eubank's film often appears to have too little to justify even its clipped 80-minute running time. 

The catalogue-handsome Gunner Wright, as the astronaut, does what he can with the thin dramatic meat floating around in front of him, but he's mostly left to play goo-goo by himself, without the modulation or variation accorded to Sam Rockwell in the not dissimilar Moon; though it provides the answer to some of this universe's mysteries, the closing stretch can't shake off the suspicion that that film, Kubrick's tourbus fave 2001 and possibly even a bit of the beloved WALL-E have been repackaged as an extended emo promo. It's certainly intriguing, though, with sporadic flashes of something bigger and more beautiful besides: perhaps one to file alongside the Pet Shop Boys' It Couldn't Happen Here and Kate Bush's The Line, The Cross and The Curve in the category of weird conceptual offshoots that end up on fans' DVD shelves.

Love opens in selected cinemas from Friday.