Artemis came back down last week and I realised I had built my mornings around it. Coffee, and a daily briefing of news from the journey to the moon. A photo of Earth looking smaller than you remember. When the news cycle wraps up on something like that, there is a small grief. You miss the rhythm of checking in on people who are very far away, and also relieved that they are all home unscathed.
Which is, happily, the exact right moment for space to be cool again. The Project Hail Mary adaptation dropped this spring, and the internet has rediscovered Andy Weir with the same enthusiasm it had for The Martian. Fly Me to the Moon handed the moon race deniers a fresh round of discourse, because apparently we are doing this again. Somewhere between the real Artemis footage and the fictional Ryland Grace, I found myself circling back to three things worth rewatching or pressing on people.
Interstellar
The one everyone has seen, or at least the one everyone has pretended to have seen. If you are in the holdout camp, Artemis week is a good excuse. Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film stars Matthew McConaughey as a former pilot pulled into a last-chance mission to find a habitable planet after Earth’s crops start failing. Anne Hathaway plays the scientist. Jessica Chastain plays the daughter left behind.
What lands is not the black hole physics, though the black hole physics was famously rigorous. It is the way the film treats time as the real antagonist. Love crossing dimensions is a big swing. Nolan mostly pulls it off because Hans Zimmer’s organ-heavy score is doing half the emotional work. The scene where McConaughey watches decades of home videos in a single sitting is the reason people still argue about this film a decade on.
It earns its ending, which is not something you can say about every three-hour sci-fi. Seriously, give it a chance.
Constellation
The niche pick for people who like a slow psychological unravelling. Constellation is the 2024 Apple TV+ series starring Noomi Rapace as an astronaut who returns from the ISS and begins to notice that nothing at home is exactly where she left it. Her daughter speaks a different language. Her marriage is off, and she can’t quite put her finger on why. Small domestic things are wrong in ways she can’t name.
It is a series about what happens to a person when the ground under them stops being reliable. Rapace is doing careful, unsettled work. Jonathan Banks plays an Apollo-era astronaut who may know more than he is letting on. The show is patient with its mystery, which will be a feature or a flaw depending on your mood. Watch it if you want space to feel like a haunted house. This was the perfect winter watch.
It pairs beautifully with Project Hail Mary, if only because both are interested in what happens to a person’s sense of self at altitude.
Foe
The wild card. Foe is the 2023 adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel, directed by Garth Davis, starring Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan as a couple on a failing farm in a near-future, drought-flattened landscape. Mescal is selected for a long-term off-world posting. The catch is the company sending him will leave a replacement version of him behind for Ronan, so she will not be on her own while he is gone.
The reviews were mixed. The film is less interested in plot mechanics than it is in the texture of a marriage held together by inertia and heat. Mescal is doing the particular thing he does where you cannot tell if he is in love or just exhausted. Ronan is better than the film deserves. There is something underneath it about consent, about what it costs to be the one left behind, about whether a copy of someone you love would actually be worse than their absence.
It is not the space film people expected from this cast. It is a film about what space does to the people who do not go.
Three different registers, three different answers to the same question: what happens to us when we look up. The Artemis crew is home. The briefings are over for now. Fortunately, there are lots of films to satisfy the space itch while we wait for technology to catch up.