Forking Paths: Another Earth
By John Semley
The idea of parallel worlds is familiar to anyone even casually acquainted with such science-fiction perennials as Star Trek and The Twilight Zone or other pop culture staples. (Comic books especially have minted the conceit for all it’s worth as a means to shake up their heroes’ histories, with both Marvel and DC devoting entire imprints to it with What If. . . ? and Elseworlds, respectively.) Like all such scenarios, Mike Cahill’s self-explanatorily titled Another Earth proceeds from a fairly straightforward “what if?” proposition, but like its one real special effect—that titular globe dangling imposingly in the sky, day and night—both the origins and the implications of its central conceit hang in the background. Whether or not the parallel Earth of Another Earth functions any differently—like the mirror-image Earth of Robert Parrish’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969)—isn’t addressed until the film’s final moments, and even then it doesn’t really matter. This is incidental science-fiction in the grand tradition of Solaris (1972), where all the hushed talk about neutrinos and other techie-jargon is entirely beside the point and stargazing speculation leads inversely to the microcosmic mysteries of the humans looking heavenwards.
