The James Webb Space Telescope has not yet generated as many headlines as climate change or other legal aid, but its planned launch in October 2021 could have a greater long-term impact. After nearly 15 years of reversal, the promising Hubble replacement will be looking at ancient galaxies and stars, and it will likely uncover distant planets that are hospitable to life in the process. Director Nathaniel Kahn’s “The Hunt for Planet B” puts the perspective in a much broader context than the bureaucracy that has been responsible for the grounding of the Webb Telescope over the years, showing how its success is a community of passionate astronomers can arise and eventually our relationship to the universe can change itself.
Kahn, who previously led the 2016 short “Into the Unknown” about the team behind the telescope, expanded the project to. Kahn’s serious review is not always the sum of its parts: it lacks the awesome production values that make ‘Cosmos’ so enjoyable and the gravitas of astronomically inclined documentaries such as ‘Nostalgia for Light’. However, Kahn just needs to point his camera in the right places to capture very moving details, as ‘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 search for extraterrestrial life under “billions and billions” of stars on the original “Cosmos,” but the field has come a long way since then. “The Hunt for Planet B” describes the eruption in the discovery of exoplanets – ie planets in other solar systems – over the past three decades, and imaginative possibilities that confirm their existence. It begins with an exciting CGI visit to one of the seven earth bodies orbiting TRAPPIST-1, a dwarf star that is 40 years light away, and thus on the receiving end of audio signals sent from Earth in the 70s. During the movie, Kahn returns to this place by examining various researchers as they work through a series of interesting questions: How would possible intelligent life forms process the earth through the time capsule we sent? Would they predict the future of climate change or distinguish the nuances of our culture?
These ideas hang with many others, while the film travels from various observatories to NASA research around Webb, providing some sort of extraordinary science 101 guide in the process. It touches on the quest to find planets in the “Goldilock 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 obliges an open-minded person to do research rather than fixed results, which is part of the reason why congressional hearings rarely yield constructive results. In one of them, along with volatile archival material, a scientist prints a timeline to discover habitable planets, saying it could happen within a decade. But Kahn’s documentaries show why the deadlines are a red herring.
The appeal of the film rather revolves around the degree of intellectual curiosity it evokes in its subjects. As such, it struggles through a clumsy acknowledgment of the many women who post it on camera, rather than allowing their accomplishments to stand merely as a fact. Kahn also forces the story into other ways of melancholy, and his occasional on-screen presence while peppering his subjects with questions interrupts the underlying strength of their observations.
However, these setbacks are noticeable because the people make such absorbing figures 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 highlight the profound nature of the quest, though the bleeding heart of ‘The Hunt for Planet B’ belongs to the outdoor solar researcher Sara Seager, who recalls the loss of her husband and its impact on the search for meaning in her work. She is the emotional backbone of a film that does not always know where to dedicate its time, but registers as an influential blend of psychological examination and intellectual accuracy when Seager appears on screen.
To his credit, “The Hunt for Planet B” appreciates the humanity of its characters above all else. One clever institutional device, built around an amateur astronomer setting up his equipment in Walden Dam, is eventually connected to another thread of the narrative, leading to the gripping finale. Everyone in “The Hunt for Planet” radiates with a pleasant enthusiasm for what they do. There is no visible conflict among them. Politicians who question the costly efforts of sending 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 scientists who might find life on other planets, the last bastions of good will can be. this one.
During this exploration, Kahn regularly cuts back to the Webb, with his outstretched, gold mirrors sliding around in an enormous laboratory as he prepares for the launch. The film especially matters for the enormous resources on display by linking it to the right investment in the interests. When the telescope goes to work, it may not provide solid answers for a world that requires immediate gratification. But it will provide many reasons to keep watching, and ‘The Hunt for Planet B’ captures many of them.
Grade: B-
‘The Hunt For Planet B’ premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2021. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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