Aurora
While the name of Roswell, New Mexico is well known to followers of UFOlogy and the paranormal, Aurora, Texas is far less famous yet it boasts a story equally strange yet equally unverified, though dating to fifty years before, April 17th, 1897, the day of “the mystery airship crash” is beyond living memory..
“The following is based on a true story,” claims the opening statement of retro-science fiction short film Aurora; “the events have been reconstructed from actual newspaper reports and documented eyewitness testimonies,” but it is apparent that liberties have been taken in the name of dramatic licence, an unsupported story pasted on top rather than an exploration of what is known.
Written and directed by Thomas Negovan and Aaron Shaps and funded by a very successful Kickstarter campaign, despite its thirty minute running time and the evocative location of the opening scene, an authentic township of the era, the efforts made to expand the flimsy premise did not extend to creating an exciting drama, this decision to play loose with truth paying no dividends.
The stated intention being to grant a “retro” feel to the project, that it is consciously anachronistic need not necessarily a problem if the material is suited to the era being recreated as demonstrated by the H P Lovecraft Historical Society’s 2005 adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu, but in Aurora this means that the structure is traditional to the point of archaic and the acting is stilted, long takes of men standing around as they discuss the object which has been found near the crash.
Possessed of a strong magnetic field, cold enough to burn the skin and emitting an almost subliminal signal which sets the teeth on edge, it is a mystery which only grows stranger when they interrogate the injured pilot of the crashed “airship;” far from the Martian suggested by the fancies of Percival Lowell quoted by Sergeant Weems (Jack Campbell) he is only foreign rather than alien.
The stranger (Robert Boulter) speaking of an experimental flying machine and an accident which led him to an unknown land where he was attacked by a hostile animal, its mate now pursues him and has followed him to Aurora to seek revenge for its death, and as the night falls the beast closes in on its quarry.
A stranger rescued by a community telling a story of inhuman horror which he has brought into their midst, the style of Lovecraft is a clear influence on Aurora but it lacks atmosphere, the bland dialogue delivered flatly with no attempt to develop the characters or create a sense of urgency, the static presentation of talking heads staged more like a radio drama than a film.
The action beyond the opening shots frustratingly confined to the single location of the sheriff’s office, while the shafts of sunlight capturing the swirling smoke are beautifully shot by John Terendy the lack of grain is incongruous with the vintage monochrome ethic, breaking the attempted illusion long before the ill-fitting final scene which was presumably intended to be a shocking twist but only succeeds in making the whole even more frustratingly disjointed.
