Space-peril anime rom-coms don’t come along every day, so Lost in Starlight (now on Netflix) might be the genre-mooshing gem we didn’t know we needed. Actually, it’s a K-space-peril anime rom-com, as Korean director Han Ji-won helms this story about an astronaut and the boy she almost maybe tries not to fall for since she seems destined to leave him behind when she rockets to Mars. Now let’s see if this story about the longest-long-distance-relationship-EVER does anything for us.
The Gist: It’s 2051. Seoul is the happier, more colorful and sunshiny version of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. Nan-young (Kim Tae-ri) lives here, among the many holograms and drones. She works for NASA as a person who can do things. Science things. She’s also in the astronaut program, and we meet her as she works her way through a high-drama training simulation, completes it successfully, then is promptly told that she’ll never be sent to Mars because she carries way too much psychological damage from when her mother died on Mars 25 years ago. Seems like the kind of thing you might tell a potential astronaut before they even complete the job application, doesn’t it? Like, hey, you ain’t gonna pass the psych exam. There. Was that so hard? Nope. Not at all. But we gotta move on. A Martian earthquake killed everyone in a research facility. Nan-young was a toddler. Now, she’s feeling directionless, the trauma of losing her mother manifests in strange cold-sweat nightmares and her dad is in an old folks’ home, carrying the delusion that his wife will return from space any day now. Sad story.
One fateful day her floating V.I.N.CENT-esque microorganism-detecting robot pal bumps into her and her turntable crashes to the floor. She takes it to a repair place and they say no and then to another repair place and they say no and then she’s on the street distracted and watching a hologram news report about her mother when she bumps into Jay (Hong Kyung), who happens to be a repair guy who works at a repair place. He’s also kinda cute? He low-key razzes her for her cheap turntable, calling it a “budget retro item” – my kinda guy, gotta say – but she really wants him to fix it because, of course, it was her mother’s. He agrees. And then kinda coerces her into eating some noodles with him at a restaurant and gets her to stop calling him “sir.” This is all rather stupid and awkward, but no one in their right mind would ever say that love isn’t those things.
Once Nan-young and Jay start hanging out together, their aurora-borealis-localized-entirely-within-your-kitchen moment occurs: She shares the song she loves loves loves, and he reveals that he wrote and sang it and posted an incomplete version of it on the web and then deleted it. DESTINY IS AFOOT. Except that he doesn’t sing very much anymore because of reasons. What reasons? REASONS, I says. They smooch, he sleeps over, they visit her dad, he realizes she’s like totally a famous astronaut. She makes a breakthrough at NASA and earns a spot on the Mars mission. He picks up his guitar again. While she participates in risky, potentially deadly activities off-planet and sends her BF messages that take 20 minutes to reach Earth, the burning dramatic question lingers: Will Jay survive performing live on stage again after so many years? Oh gawd, the drama!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lost in Starlight is like the Eva Green Astronaut Peril movie Proxima crossed with dramatically slight teenybopper anime stuff like The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes.
Performance Worth Watching: This is as good a place as any to highlight the work of the animators, who gussy up Lost in Starlight’s deeply flimsy romance with frequently gorgeous and intricately detailed visuals.
Memorable Dialogue: Prime example of the earnest blandness of the dialogue: “You’re already special,” Jay says to Nan-young. “Doesn’t matter to me if you’re up there or down here.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: First of all, Jay’s songs, which persistently pop up on the soundtrack like gophers on a radish farm, make Coldplay sound like Cannibal Corpse. I’ve heard edgier rock ‘n’ roll warbling from the throat of Barney the Dinosaur. Jack Johnson called, and he wants his teeny-tiny barely perceptible molasses-drenched melodic choruses back. The music’s pervasive blandness is an accurate representation of the protagonists’ personalities, which are blank things upon which we can project our own insecurities and idiosyncrasies. Jay and Nan-young are adults with a teenager’s notion of love and romance. You can see the CRINGE all the way to and/or from Mars.
Admittedly, the substance of Lost in Starlight may be better appreciated by demographics outside my own. Ironic and/or earnest appreciators of this brand of fluttersome pishposh won’t find anything beyond the norm here – although the protagonists’ emotions are weirdly muted, the tendrils of their yearning just barely stretching from Earth all the way to the red planet. Even more curious is how Han builds to a bizarre climactic juxtaposition of Nan-young’s test of survival on Mars with, um, Jay’s similarly death-defying return to the stage to sing his mumbly-guy lovelorn pop tunes? Both arcs are given the same sense of dramatic consequence.
The film’s saving grace for some is its inspired animation, which is unwaveringly lovely, from the colorful clutter of urban Seoul to the abstract hallucinatory art that comprises the visual manifestations of Nan-young’s trauma. Say what now? Right – surreal, but ultimately more pretty than haunting, imagery from her head repeatedly spills out into the story’s reality, so we may be confused by some plot occurrences, specifically the conclusion, which will find us pondering the hows and whys of what happened. All of this stuff, the astronaut drama, the romance, the wild visual flourishes, the music that couldn’t lift a 2.5-lb. dumbbell, might be functional on its own, but when crammed together, make for one tonally lumpy, disorienting movie.
Our Call: Too many faults in these stars. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.