Stories about sole astronauts roaming space have been told many times. Hollywood made a few, including two recent-ish blockbusters, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” (2013) and Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” (2015). What distinguishes Ukrainian filmmaker Pavlo Ostrikov ‘s “ U Are the Universe ” is that it’s really a compassionate love story.
The framework might be futuristic, but the emotions on display are as old as the human race. The film explores how its lead finds solace in his life while opening his heart to love, when faced with the finality of existence. The themes are expansive, but the film owes its success to the peculiarity of the situation it presents.
In an unspecified future, Ukrainian trucker Andriy Melnyk (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is sent by a waste disposal company on missions to Castillo, Jupiter’s moon. What he’s tasked to dispose of — or the particulars of what happened on Earth to lead to this situation — is never specified; nor does it need to be. What matters for the film’s premise is he’s alone in space, with only a robot called Maxim (voiced by Leonid Popadko) to keep him company.
Maxim is programmed to provide levity and keep Andriy alive at all costs — two undertakings that the robot finds hard to accomplish when Earth mysteriously explodes and it appears that Andriy becomes its only surviving organism. This setup is told briskly, in economical, but amusing, scenes. The robot constantly talks to Andiry, telling him bad jokes, .