Millennials only know these three things: how to be obsessed with technology, the importance of authenticity, and that something in the world is very wrong right now. These are some of the subjects that the recently released, science fiction-comedy film Save Yourselves! explores. Written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, the film depicts a young couple’s week away from the hustle and bustle of modern technology that is waylaid by the invasion of tribble-like aliens, called “pouffes”. While I found elements of the film such as its plot and cinematography to be average and not particularly noteworthy, Save Yourselves! makes strong use of its characters and overall theme.
Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani) are a young couple from Brooklyn. Like most people these days, every element of their lives is overly-infused with various technologies, digital media, and the internet. Their lives are filled with mindless scrolling, their jobs require them to be online (or else they could be fired), and even their arguments are punctuated only by asides to Alexa to pause, resume, and stop. At a party, two of their friends are more concerned over the optics of getting married in Mexico with a Mariachi band than confronting why this idea makes them so uncomfortable or embracing something that they enjoy. Another friend, Raph (Ben Sinclair), humble-brags about his latest start-up company making 3-D printed surfboards out of algae in Nicaragua (this appears to be a solution to something but in fact, helps no one) and offers that Su and Jack stay up at his grandfather’s recently restored cabin. On their way out of the party, Jack and Su passionately exclaim how they want to work to be better collectively and with each other — Jack wants to start a community garden and Su thinks that it would be good if she decided to be a vegetarian again. Each of the characters throughout the film understands the value of authenticity but, in striving towards it so fiercely and singularly, they only ever capture conceptual fragments of it rather than actually living authentically.
With the offer of a stay at a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere fresh in their minds, Jack and Su decide to disconnect for a week. You can leave a voicemail after the beep, but they’re serious, they’ll be offline and off-the-grid until the end of their vacation…no matter what. Barring, except, hand written articles pulled from the internet on “how to be a better we,” argument induced phone checking, and, of course, an alien invasion.
Save Yourselves! is a charmingly absurd and witty look at the struggles of modern adulthood. Being an adult in the world today is a constant tug of war between idealized concepts of what life should be and the lived realities of what life actually is. All of our technology and the internet makes us feel more connected than ever, but in reality we have become disconnected not only from each other but the natural world around us. We desire authenticity in our lives but find the idea of being honest with ourselves about ourselves near insurmountable. We have the awareness to understand what is wrong in the world but seldomly the motivation to create real, meaningful change. Jack and Su’s complex struggle to reconcile these conflicting notions of ‘should be’ and ‘actually is’ throughout the course of the film makes them feel stunningly real even amidst an invasion of deadly yet adorable alien pouffes in crystalline space pods. At the end of the day (or alien invasion), who we are doesn’t really matter all that much — what matters is what we choose to make of our realities.
As the alien pod they’ve been sealed into and hundreds of others leave the Earth’s atmosphere, rocketing out into space, Jack, baffled by the turn of events, inquires, “Are we saved?” The film’s only answer to this question comes from its title — we must save ourselves.
Save Yourselves! is now available in theaters nationwide and on digital October 6th.
