The James Webb space telescope hasn’t generated as many headlines as climate change activism or some other emergency law, but its planned launch in October 2021 could have an even greater long-term impact. After nearly 15 years of turnaround, the promising replacement of Hubble will peer into ancient galaxies and stars, revealing potentially distant planets hospitable to life to come. Director Nathaniel Kahn’s “The Hunt for Planet B” places that perspective in a much broader context than the bureaucracy that has been responsible for grounding the Webb telescope all these years, and shows how its success could help a community of passionate stargazers. and ultimately our relationship with the universe could change itself.
Kahn, who previously directed the 2016 short film ‘Into the Unknown’ about the team behind the telescope, has expanded that project into. Kahn’s serious overview isn’t always the sum of its parts: it lacks the awe-inspiring production values that make “Cosmos” so much fun and the heaviness of astronomically-minded documentaries like “Nostalgia for the Light.” However, Kahn just needs to aim his camera in the right place to capture lots of mesmerizing detail, because “The Hunt for Planet B” celebrates a community whose enthusiasm for the possibility of life on other planets is downright contagious.
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Carl Sagan may have popularized the quest for alien life among “billions and billions” of stars in the original “Cosmos,” but the field has come a long way since then. “The Hunt for Planet B” describes the eruption of the discovery of exoplanets – that is, planets in other solar systems – over the past three decades, and the imaginative possibilities of confirming their existence. It begins with an exciting CGI visit to one of seven Earth bodies orbiting TRAPPIST-1, a dwarf star about 40 light years away, and thus on the receiving end of audio signals sent from Earth in the 1970s. are sent. Throughout the film, Kahn returns to this location through the musings of several researchers as they answer a series of intriguing questions: How would possible intelligent life forms process Earth through the time capsule we sent their way? Would they predict the future of climate change or discern the nuances of our culture?
These ideas dangle alongside many others as the film travels from different observatories to NASA research around Webb, providing a sort of extrasolar scientific guide. It touches on the search for planets in the “Goldilocks Zone,” that heavenly sweet place where life can exist, and considers the consequences of discovering life elsewhere, even if the researchers who discover it can never visit it themselves. Taken as a whole, they show how the field mandates an openness to inquiry rather than hard results, which is part of why congressional hearings rarely produce constructive results. In one, sampled in fleeting archival footage, a scientist pushed for a timeline for discovering habitable planets, saying it could happen “ within a decade. ” But Kahn’s documentaries show why those deadlines are red herring.
Instead, the film’s appeal depends on the degree of intellectual curiosity it evokes in the subjects. As such, it struggles through an awkward admission of the many women it puts on camera, rather than allowing their achievements to count as a matter of fact. Kahn forces the story into brutality in other ways as well, and his occasional off-screen presence as he questions his subjects interrupts the underlying power of their observations.
Those setbacks stand out, however, because people provide such compelling numbers in the first place. Many of the talking heads of the Webb team, including Amy Lo, Gregory Robinson and project manager Bill Ochs, show how the project has evolved into a diverse team fully committed to a new phase of astronomical research. SETI’s Maggie Turnbull and Elinor Gates add even more depth to the nature of the quest at hand, although the bleeding heart of “The Hunt for Planet B” belongs to ex-solar researcher Sara Seager, who recalls the loss of her husband and its impact on the search. for meaning in her work. She’s the emotional backbone of a movie that doesn’t always know what to spend its time on, but registers as a poignant blend of soul exploration and intellectual rigor when Seager appears on screen.
It is to the credit that “The Hunt for Planet B” especially cherishes the humanity of its characters. A clever framing device, built around an amateur astronomer who installs his gear in the Walden pond, eventually joins another thread of the story and leads to the moving finale. Everyone in “The Hunt for Planet” radiates with a pleasant enthusiasm for what they do. There is no discernible conflict between them. Politicians who question the costly efforts to send telescopes into space would do well to consider the film’s argument for the sincerity of the scientific community, and the possibility that the same researchers living on other planets might find, the last bastions of goodwill are on this one.
During this exploration, Kahn routinely returns to the Webb, with its huge, golden mirrors sliding around an immense laboratory as it prepares for launch. Above all, the film argues for the enormous resources displayed by linking them to real investment in the stakes at hand. When the telescope goes to work, it may not provide definitive answers for a world that requires instant gratification. But it will give many reasons to keep looking up, and “The Hunt for Planet B” captures a lot of it.
Grade B-
“The Hunt For Planet B” premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2021. It is currently looking for distribution in the US.
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