After doing so, the rest of the film feels like an anti-climax lacking in the same kind of dramatic interest. The downside of Orbiter 9 is that Hatem Khraiche fires off his most interesting twist fairly early in the show. Thereafter, the film follows Clara Lago’s adjustment to the outside world. Orbiter 9 is the first of these to build its story as a Conceptual Breakthrough work – one where the protagonist comes to the understanding that their conception of the world is not what they initially believed it to be.
#ORBITER 9 2017 TV#
We have had occasional works before that reveal that what people believe to be space missions are in fact elaborate simulations – the tv mini-series Ascension (2014) or the Doctor Who episode Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974). Helena (Clara Lago), lone girl on a space mission and Alex (Alex Gonzalez), the first other person she has met This spins everything we have seen during the first twenty minutes into an intriguingly different territory.
#ORBITER 9 2017 SERIES#
We are puzzled as this is not into his own spaceship but along a series of concrete corridors – I was prepared to go with this as I had seen low-budget films before that use regular industrial plants to represent spaceship interiors – but then he climbs up and out of a bunker into a standard terrestrial forest. This starts things off intriguingly but the spin the film then places onto this is to follow Alex on his journey out from her ship.
We are introduced to Clara Lago and the loneliness and tedium of her onboard journey before the visit of engineer Alex Gonzalez come to affect repairs (the first human being that she has ever met other than her parents) where she pleads with him to stay the night, followed by his departure.
Orbiter 9 starts out as a standard space exploration film. The film’s Spanish title Orbita 9 directly translates as Orbit 9, which parses rather clunkily in English and so the film was renamed for Orbiter 9 release to Netflix. Prior to this, Hatem Khraiche had made six short films – one of these, The Hidden Face (2011), has gained sufficient renown that it has been remade twice – as well as co-written the zombie film The Returned (2013). Orbiter 9 is a feature-length directorial debut for Hatem Khraiche Ruiz-Zorrilla (who usually only goes by his first two names). However, when her absence is realised, this makes the two of them into fugitives. The two spend their time together, she discovering the outside world for the first time. Affected by his time with Helena, Alex returns, breaks the truth of her situation to her and then sneaks her out.
However, unknown to her, the entire Orbit 9 mission is one of a series of simulations buried underground on Earth that have been set up to test reactions for a proposed space mission and Alex is the maintenance engineer. Having never seen another human being other than her parents before, she persuades him to spend the night with her but he then has to go. She is now visited by another ship containing the engineer Alex. Due to an error, the ship’s oxygen supplies were depleted and her parents sacrificed themselves so she could continue on alone. She was brought on board as an infant and has spent the entire nineteen years of her life on the ship. Helena is the sole person aboard the Orbit 9 space mission to the planet Celeste.