I half expected this short film to turn into a bizarro version of Planet of the Apes. I wanted this aged space chimp to land on an irradiated Earth, thousands of years after his departure (due to the temporal demands of general relativity) and scream to the heavens in chimp language, “You blew it all up, you bastards!”
I know that, as a WWF vessel, Space Chimp is supposed to instill a feeling of environmental stewardship in the viewer. Instead, I imaged a lifetime floating through the void, and thought how small my Earth-bound life would seem. How trivial is our day to day existence compared with the vastness of space? Going to the bank, making toast, chit-chatting with a co-worker — it’s hard to thing of these as anything other than Vonnegut’s analogy of a race of “wiggling tubes,” eating, dancing, dying, and giving birth to smaller tubes.
Is this all just a 3AM nihilistic ramble? Perhaps. But I think there’s also something to the fact that many, if not all of us have lost the meaning that should be afforded to our existence. We’ve lost it in the trivialities of modern life, in the day-to-day. Without a bold and/or transcendent adventure on the horizon, what’s the point of carrying on?
