he year is 2057. Special Agent Hayes (Mercer), an investigator for Earth's totalitarian government, arrives at an isolated research base on the Saturnian moon Titan, in response to the apparent suicide of the project's leader. The man had evidently just walked outside, sans spacesuit, and allowed himself to be blown away by one of the moon's frequent violent storms. Was it suicide? Or something else?
If murder, there's a definite shortage of suspects, as the facility's surviving staff numbers only two: Lippert (Mercer), a haunted, quietly embittered woman who can barely bring herself to meet the investigator's eyes, and Sterner (Karibalis), who answers any question put to him but doesn't bother to hide the bored insolence driving his responses.
Neither professes any great affection for their departed boss. They frankly don't seem affected by his death, one way or the other. They're too worn down by isolation, by routine and by their alienation from an Earth that seems to have lost all hope. Hayes is not much better. Despite his curt facade, he's taken to drug abuse following his realization that he's just another paid killer, murdering dissidents and their families on the orders of the tyrants in charge.
Meanwhile, a howling storm continues to scour the planet's surface. And Hayes begins to wonder: Is there another intelligent entity inhabiting the harsh surface of Titan?
Downbeat drama in a tight place
Ascension has won awards for its production design, which is a little miracle of imagination triumphing over what must have been a minimal budget. There's no obvious fakery in it. With little more than narrow corridors, cramped rooms, shadowy lighting and occasional glimpses of a surface that is little more than orange sand whipped up by high winds, it fully captures its extraterrestrial environment and the depressing day-to-day drudgery of a deep-space mission that offers more soul-deadening routine than thrill-a-minute adventure. Between that and a cast of unglamorous leads chosen to embody the despair of existence in such a place, it fully embodies the sense that this particular future sucks.
That, alas, is one of its major problems. Hopelessness and tedium are, after all, difficult qualities to dramatize if you don't want to just create more. It has been managed brilliantly, in the past (by, among others, Stanley Kubrick, namesake of the award this film won at the Long Island Film Festival), but the trick remains hard to pull off, and Ascension doesn't quite manage it. The three principals are so walled off, so determinedly not connecting with one another, even in a sex scene more driven by desperation than any actual passion, that none ever come to life as characters. The long silences between them communicate only that these people are already lost to us, and perhaps not worth knowing.
It's a smart film. And a heartfelt one, and one made with genuine craft. All it really misses, unfortunately, is a reason to care.
