Another Earth bravely attempts to straddle the line between sci-fi and indie film: A duplicate Earth appears in the skies over our Earth, and we watch as damaged people react to the news that there are copies of them on that other planet. While filmgoers should always encourage this kind of genre-smooshing, Another Earth fails on both sides of the line: It's a generic indie film that's way too lazy with its sci-fi trappings.
On the night that the other Earth appears in the sky, a too-drunk-to-drive young woman named Rhoda (Brit Marling, kind of a more wistful Sarah Polley) crashes her car into another car, killing an entire family except for the husband (William Mapother, aka that guy from Lost, sublime in his weird-looking, wounded Mapotherness). Rhoda is jailed for manslaughter, and when she is released from prison, her entire life has passed her by. She gets a job as a janitor in a high school and walks around a lot in weirdly beautiful distant shots with a giant Earth looming in the sky. Eventually, through the kind of twisted improbabilities that only happen in indie movies, she becomes a maid for Mapother's character, who for some reason doesn't know who she is.
Through what must be a combination of lazy filmmaking and tiny budgets, neither genre has been employed on a satisfactory level. On the indie side, there's a lot of sad staring at objects in the middle distance, and the plot feels obvious and stagy. On the sci-fi side, there's no real curiosity to the script: Wouldn't an Earth-sized planet approaching Earth wreak havoc with tidal patterns? What would the world's religions do if this kind of an event happened? It would be nice if the screenwriters even hinted at a world beyond these dreary charactersâinstead, they basically make the other Earth a Giant Indie Film Metaphor. Which basically makes this movie a Huge Fucking Bore. 
