The West Coast premiere of Saturn at the Newport Beach Film Festival yielded tears and applause by the time credits rolled on the low-budget sci-fi drama, which successfully distills a Marvel-esque, apocalyptic superhero story into a compelling character study.
No capes, spandex or even much CGI were needed to keep eyes glued to the screen for 101 minutes as the secretly super-powered protagonist (Dominic Bogart) wrestles with answering the call to sacrifice himself to save Earth, or to keep living for his wife (Piercey Dalton) and son (Elijah Maximus). The family lives in a quiet beachside town after he renounced his duties as a “Shepherd,” a role assigned by the gods to guard self-sabotaging humanity.
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Through the looming threat of a mysterious planet hovering in the gloomy Pacific Northwest sky as it continues on a collision course with Earth, director Eric Esau and cinematographer Matthew Lowe create a bleak atmosphere for the intimate drama to slowly and steadily unfold, revealing an intergalactic mythology, buried traumas, and family secrets that threaten the very marriage a retired savior so desperately wants to save.
With strong performances, choice special effects, cool locations, and just enough action to satisfy genre expectations, Saturn manages to look like it cost a lot more to make than it actually did.
The Saturn Family
Producer and co-writer Douglas Haines cited family — literally and figuratively — for pulling off the feat during a Q&A that followed the Friday night screening.
“There’s this terrible word of family, and you think that’s an excuse for just not paying your people,” he said. “But really the underlying idea is that everybody kind of bought into the whole thing.”
He added that “there were enough people in the process that were just really, really excited to make a movie that we all kind of believed in” and that “everybody kind of went, you know, ‘I’m here for the ride.’”
Haines shouted out vIsual effects supervisor Chris Wells, who was sitting in the audience among other key players gathered to watch the fruit of their labor.
“Chris just did this in the wood shop behind his house,” the producer said. “There’s like 200 VFX shots, and he’s just like, ‘Man, I just love making indie movies, and I think this is really great, and so I’m gonna help you guys out.’”
Esau co-wrote the film with his wife, Anna Esau — also a producer and production designer — and credited her for helping him navigate the most challenging part of the creative process.
“The hardest part was us just trying to get the emotions right, and for the audience to connect with the characters and to understand what we were hoping for them to feel. Anna and I, we’re iterating at night after we put the kids to bed, over and over and over again, trying to just get the emotions right.” Esau said. “When you’re creating a film, and there’s multiple timelines going on in different relationships, trying to get the family unit right, and that separation that they’re feeling, but the desire to come back together, it’s really hard.”
Onscreen, the gravitational force that holds Saturn together is a father’s love for his family and the fear of them suffering without him.
“If I sacrifice my life, is it not only that, but also sacrificing my own family’s?” the protagonist asks in the film, setting up an internal struggle that shapes external battles, too. It all comes full circle, but of course, MovieMaker wouldn’t dare spoil a good movie, so any interested viewers not attending the Newport Beach Film Festival will have to wait until this subversive superhero movie finds a distributor, while those that are there this week can catch another screening Tuesday at 5 p.m.
“The heart of this film is really about family, but it’s also about the choices that we make in our daily lives,” Esau said, and noted that a character’s struggle with addiction in the film was inspired by someone in his own family.
“It’s a message for this person, that even amidst your addiction, you’re still called to something great and still called to something meaningful,” he explained. “Yeah, it might not be destroying a planet, but it might be getting out of bed in the morning. It might be making your kid a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”