Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

We do love a good ‘something terrible from space’ movie and The Astronaut is the latest in a long proud line. Alasdair Stuart took a look at the trailer to see what menaces from space he could see.

Behind the camera

Writer and director Jess Varley has previously directed several shorts, including the ‘Outpost 37’ and ‘Atelophobia’ sections of anthology movie Phobias. Interestingly, Macy Gray, also in the cast here, was in Phobias. Always interesting to see directors and actors work together across multiple projects.

Cast

Kate Mara has phenomenal genre experience, including the overlooked Class of ’09, Invincible, The Martian, Black Mirror and the Josh Trank directed Fantastic Four. Not all of them were successful but she was always good in them.

Laurence Fishburne of course needs no introduction. A former Perry White, Neo from The Matrix, The Bowery King from John Wick. The man is a legend – watch anything he’s in and you’ll have a good time, odds are.

Gabriel Luna too has excellent previous experience in the field. His work as Tommy in The Last of Us is vital to the show. He was great as Robbie Reyes in Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. and was great as the REV-9 in the overlooked Terminator: Dark Fate.

Splashdown

I am, I cheerfully admit, a space fan so this thing got my attention from the first image. But what really hooked me was the image of Mara’s Captain Sam Walker, strapped in, unconscious and partially submerged. This is very, very bad. This is one step away from outright catastrophe. This is so bad that the only time a capsule was ever lost on recovery in the early days of crewed spaceflight, the pilot Gus Grissom, struggled with the reputational damage for years afterwards. That makes his launchpad death along with Apollo 1 colleagues Ed White and Roger Chaffee a few years later all the more tragic.

All of which is to say, what’s happening here is very, very bad and what happens next is slightly anomalous as a result. Sam had a near miss but putting her somewhere out of the way to recover feels more like containment than recuperation.

Quarantine

The beat at 0.24 where Sam is reunited with her family is pretty legit. Early crews especially were quarantined on return.

Also, this may be something, it may be nothing, but that is not the current NASA logo. There’s normally a red swoosh across it. Maybe it’s just a likeness issue but given what we’re about to see… maybe not.

Remote Location

There’s a drone shot of the compound at 0.46 and it just feels off. Why is she in such a remote location? Without any apparent security or medical facilities? It reminds me, and this has a lot of implications, of The Signal. Released over a decade ago, The Signal starred future Nightwing Brenton Thwaites as one of several people road tripping across the US, being taunted by an underground hacker. They get dragged into his world, along with a mysterious biosuit-wearing scientist. One played by Laurence Fishburne. Without going into spoilers, The Signal’s ending is very, very cool and it’s very hard not to think that The Astronaut may have more than a cast member in common with the previous movie.

Shadow

That’s an interesting alien we see in silhouette at the back of the image at 1.06. Firstly, it’s tall, which is exactly what Grey aliens in UFO lore traditionally aren’t. Secondly, it’s weirdly bulky and muscular. It reminds me a lot of the aliens from stunningly good Caitlin Dever movie No One Will Save You, currently on Disney Plus.

Containment

Yeah, the bulkhead doors and red alert sirens at 1.22 do not look like the sort of thing that a hospital tends to have, do they?

Passengers

The mention of bruises, and the levitating egg at 1.28 put me in mind of Monolith, another small-scale movie about a woman on the edge of terrestrial understanding. It also makes me wonder if this is a Body as Timeshare situation. That Sam’s seeing the consequences of something her body is doing but isn’t in control of that body.

Swarm

The family running from a swarm of birds at 1.49 is doing exactly nothing to assuage my suspicions this has happened before and they’re in at least one level of prison.

Kill Team

To say nothing of the large chaps in battle amour with assault rifles storming the house at the end. But are they coming to save Sam or stop her?

The Astronaut is due for release on October 17th, 2025. No word yet on the rest of the world.