Last Sunrise (2014 Straight-to-Video)

Though only 39 minutes in length, this extremely well-designed and well-produced film deserves to be listed with all the important Mars feature films that are central to this book. John Johnson and Rusty Royden have given birth to a fabulously beautiful child named Last Sunrise. Crammed into its 39 minutes is a stylistic masterpiece that is at once a parody of reality TV, soulless TV news, and our adrenalin-rush-based culture, while at the same time providing stunningly realistic Martian terrain and a real sense of what it must feel like to be alone on Mars.

Beyond that, it is a real-time drama, which is a sub-genre that is always fascinating (High Noon falls into this category). We meet astronaut Steven Drake just after recovering from his rough and tumble parachute landing on a patch of Mars. He radios that he has only 40 minutes of air left, and then the camera remains on him for the next 39 minutes, with the occasional cut-away to a newscast. This is a wonderful concept and works surprisingly well.

The back-story of the picture is that a colony of 12 souls has been established within the Hellas planitia basin—a venture that is the basis for a reality TV show named RedThesis. Millions of earthbound viewers have been watching the joys, woes, antics, and sacrifices that the Mars crew has experienced every day since take-off seven months earlier. On day number 37 following the landing and establishment of the colony on the surface of Mars, a shuttle carrying the pilot Phil Miller and Steven Drake loses control, with Drake ejecting with a parachute. He lands roughly and rips his spacesuit, but he is able to quickly patch it. Once he calms down, he tries desperately to contact the shuttle pilot Phil Miller and the RedThesis base, but gets no response. In frustration he periodically exclaims this reality TV’s version of cussing: “son of a monkey!” “bull spit!” “corn nuts!” “son of a motherless goat!” “mother trucker!” and more. It all seems realistic as Drake introspects throughout the movie's 39 minutes, judging his major successes and failures.

Shooting in the Mohave Desert.

The filmmakers have utilized California’s Mohave Desert to the absolute best advantage. 

With a little help from digital magic, the sands, the rocks, the coloring all seem spotlessly appropriate. The only note that is off-key are a few shots of the Martian skies, which while mostly appearing appropriately pinkish throughout very occasionally can be seen as bluish, sometimes even with white clouds. The reality show feed is often interrupted by Global News Network (GNN) news reports featuring Vicki Chang, who tells us that the whole mission is financed by the Micronesia Unilateral Space Fund (MUSF). Vicki Chang is played by Nanrisa Lee, who perfectly embodies the faux newscaster.
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Nanrisa Lee plays newscaster.

Quickly, Drake learns from the orbiting Phobos Base Control Center that the shuttle crashed into the colony, killing everybody, including Phil. Drake only has a few minutes of oxygen remaining and is understandably upset. Happily, Phobos Center tells him that they’re sending Shuttle 2 down to get him in time before his oxygen is depleted. In a startling shot, Shuttle 2 violently crashes. Drake knows he will die in just a few minutes.

One of this film’s clever innovations is that Drake is accompanied by a little rover named Lassie. Lassie is about the size of a cigar box and is constantly mobile, whirring and racing around, surveying its rocky surroundings. We often see through Lassie’s digital eyes, seeing its many digital readouts, and the effect is charming. Very quickly one bonds with the tiny robot.

Drake with Lassie.

A Lassie status screen.

"Lassie"

At the end of Last Sunset, Lassie discovers an anomaly, which Drake, during his last few moments of life concludes is artificial, proving the existence of past life on Mars or at least that the red planet had been visited by aliens, in either case proving that life exists elsewhere than only on earth—a matter that is certainly inconclusive from our point of view.

The last thing we see is a POV shot from Lassie as it continues its surveying mission—all alone.

Throughout the movie to the last frame, Chris Maine's music is the perfect complement: beautiful gentle melodies that appropriately but subtly remind viewers of a chiming ticking clock.

 Last Sunrise trailer

From the moment I saw that Last Sunrise was available via Amazon video around mid–2014, I assumed it was a knockoff of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, which was getting a lot of press. The posters are similar, a lone astronaut with helmet facing the camera, and the premises are very similar, a lone astronaut facing death on the Red Planet. Usually any knockoff’s raison d’être is to steer unwitting consumers to mistakenly rent or buy the knockoff, thinking it’s the anticipated major movie. A perfect example of this The Asylum’s Martian Land, which is intentionally crafted and marketed to resemble Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

Yet, I wasn’t able to believe that Last Sunrise fell into this category. I believed the concurrent availability of Last Sunrise and The Martian was likely coincidental. Why? Because Last Sunrise was simply too good and too well crafted to exist to merely bilk the unwary. Or, perhaps the timely appearance of The Last Sunrise was simply, I thought, as benign as John Johnson and Rusty Royden wanting to make the movie for some time without ever getting funding, but then the fortuitous announcement of Scott’s big-budget movie opened some coffers. While reality wasn’t exactly this scenario, it turned out to  be something of this sort as I’ve learned since the filmmakers got in touch with me.

Last Sunrise is filled with
clever graphics and sound effects.

Producer Rusty Royden of Sidewall Puncture Productions, offers some details, “The entire cast and crew was less than 10 people. It took well less than a year from first concept to final print.  The "budget" was less than $10,000.   Shooting totaled about 6 days.  We were able to use about 90% of the footage. This was done for fun and art for arts sake. We were just starting production when we heard Twentieth Century Fox was going to produce The Martian.  We completed our film before 20th finished shooting.  We read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars as research material when we were fine-tuning the script. The Mars One and other grass roots Mars colonization ventures were an inspiration for some of the story elements but the inspiration for the main story came from somewhere else.”

As to that “somewhere else,” filmmaker John Johnson says, “Everyone involved with the production knew that Last Sunrise (the script) was a dream that I had two nights in a row… On the Morning after the second dream, I called Rusty and told him the details of the dream... Way before Matt Damon and The Martian.

Effects

Johnson explains some of the secrets that went into perfecting Last Sunrise:

“Lassie came to life when Freddie Vaziri showed up at the Mojave Location and offered to run the remote control. Without Freddie, half of the shots captured from the camera on Lassie would have never happened.” 

It turns out that the perfect Martian desert we see in the film needed a lot of help to come alive. Johnson says: “I used stills from Death Valley and rotoscoped. For example, when Drake walks back down the small rise toward camera just before he passes out and when he wakes up and stands up, the upper half of the horizon (above the ridge line) is a still image from Death Valley. There were so many bushes off in the distance. So, I had to cut a matte line along the ridge (behind Drake) to allow the Death Valley still to be the distant horizon and the sky. Plus, I had to cut out Drake (frame by frame) so he would overlay cleanly over the foreground and the background still image. Another big visual challenge was rotoscoping out the grasshoppers that were flying through the shots. The hard part is the time it takes to do it. I was working all day at my day job and then came home and rotoscoped for 4 to 5 hours a night for 8 months. No complaints though because no one has even questioned the imagery. It was meticulously executed and the overlays really are seamless. I also used hand-painted backdrops.”

Shuttle 2 crashes.

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Last Sunrise (2014 Straight-to-Video)

USA. Sidewall Puncture Productions, Tug 33 Thirty and Three Films, Hoo Ha Grande Productions. lastsunrisethemovie.com. C. 1.85:1. 39m.

CREW: Director John Johnson. News Segments Director Phil Ramuno. Script John Johnson, Rusty Royden, Freddie Vaziri, Phil Ramuno. Producers John Johnson, Rusty Royden. Score Chris Maines. Director of Photography Brian Q. Kelley. Editor William Thompson. Visual Effects Designer Joseph Potter. Lassie Rover Pilot Freddie Vaziri.

CAST: Steven Drake Rusty Royden/Gus Novack. Vicki Chang Nanrisa Lee.

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