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Film Review: IT’S QUIETER IN THE TWILIGHT: Touching Tribute to a Fading Outbound Mission [SXSW 2022]

Its Quieter In The Twilight

It’s Quieter In the Twilight Review

It’s Quieter in the Twilight (2022Film Review from the 29th Annual South by Southwest Film Festival, a movie directed by Billy Miossi, starring Suzanne Dodd, Jefferson Hall, Enrique Medina, Sun Matsumoto, Todd Barber, Fernando Peralta, Andrea Angrum, Lu Yang, Ed Stone, and Chris Jones.

This remarkably lucid documentary centers on the handful of scientists remaining who continue to monitor the Voyager Program in its 45th year.

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The Voyager Program was conceived to take advantage of close observation of the giants in our solar system, from Jupiter to Neptune. In addition, they were also the first interstellar probes, designed to continue collecting data as they venture beyond our solar system. But what really captured the public imagination was their secondary mission of searching for extrasolar civilizations. So, when the launch dates approached, public interest in the Voyager Program hit its crest.

Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977 in a southerly direction. Voyager 1, which contains the ‘golden record,’ launched later that year on September 5, taking the northerly direction. As the probes completed their primary mission, the general public were nearly as awed by the images returned to mission control as the scientists themselves. They had decided to have Voyager 1 forego a glimpse of Pluto to study Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, as its dense atmosphere had already garnered a lot of attention.

Of course, the probes sent back much more than pictures. As much or more valuable to the scientific team was the hard data that turned theories into facts, as well as reporting conditions they had never considered. Among these discoveries was the confirmation of the heliopause, a sort of magnetic protective bubble surrounding our solar system.

Billy Miossi takes a no-frills, straightforward filmmaking approach in this opus, similar to those by Barbara Kopple. Miossi manages to allow these diverse, dedicated scientists take us into their confidence. They seem comfortable in front of the camera, both at work and their own homes. They share enlightening yet comprehensible information about their roles in the mission, without getting too technical; a layman would have no problem following along.

By contrast, Voyager Mission Control is not the media-frenzied place it was decades ago. Its primary mission complete, the team — now scaled down to eleven members — is housed on the first floor of a modest business complex. Most of the cubicles are empty. Understandably, the appropriations for the project, while regularly granted, slowly dwindle, as all the team can do now is maintain and monitor as long as they are able.

But Miossi also evokes extraordinary sympathy; each team member recalls how they joined the program, the depth of commitment, professional and personal in about equal parts, that still binds them today. This, I believe, is the filmmakers’ primary goal with this documentary. In spite of no longer being a media darling, there is still important work to be done, even on a shoestring, and it falls to what is left of the original group to do it.

With the probes now light-years away in two diverging directions, the program’s main issue is preserving power by ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ as the saying goes. Otherwise, the probes would drift, and any data collection would be happenstance. Of course, eventually the probes will be beyond our ability to monitor and, by extension, control them. The probes will be entirely on their own. The ‘twilight’ finally turned into night.

A melancholy thought, especially since so few people know of this near-dusk, mighty effort to explore space. But in the long run, as I pondered the Voyager Project in its full context, I felt a mounting sense of awe.

I reminded myself that it’s not as though the Voyager Program didn’t leave a lasting indelible mark on our society. Some very fine artistic contributions have already paid tribute to it — Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Starman are good examples of speculative fiction. Carl Sagan also dedicated several episodes of Cosmos to the Voyager Project (Not surprising, since he chaired the committee that constructed the ‘golden record.’) Recent documentaries include The Farthest and Memory of Mankind.

It’s Quieter in the Twilight, in my opinion, not only stands strong on its own, it deserves a place among those already in the Voyager canon.

Rating: 8/10

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David McDonald

David Erasmus McDonald was born in Baltimore into a military family, traveling around the country during his formative years. After a short stint as a film critic for a local paper in the Pacific Northwest and book reviewer, he received an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, mentored by Ross Klavan and Richard Uhlig. Currently he lives in the Hudson Valley, completing the third book of a supernatural trilogy entitled “Shared Blood.”
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