I Write About a Lot of Obscure, Half-Assed Movies Nobody Cares About For This Website and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 2019's Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime is One Such Film

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

It’s just a hunch, but I suspect that one of the reasons this website has struggled to find and grow an audience and attain economic sustainability is because rather than write about the movie of the moment, or new movies, or important movies, or movies that people are talking about I instead write about bullshit obscure random-ass movies that nobody fucking cares about. 

Sometimes I watch these bullshit obscure random-ass movies that nobody fucking cares about because they feature either John Travolta or Nicolas Cage. They have each made a LOT of movies that fall into that unfortunate category. 

But more often I watch bullshit obscure random-ass movies that nobody fucking cares because you choose them for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and that is the feature just barely keeping this rickety vehicle afloat in perpetually stormy times. 

Most of the time you choose fascinating oddities that I either legitimately love or love making fun of but some of the time you choose films I’ve never heard of and would never even think about watching and writing about if I were not obligated to do so. 

I’m talking about movies like 2019’s Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime. I know that might sound like a series of words chosen at random but it’s the title of what can very generously be called a movie. 

Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime is most notable for its novel mashing of genres. It’s a post-apocalyptic science-fiction stoner romantic comedy but at the risk of being harsh, it’s not one of the better post-apocalyptic science-fiction stoner romantic comedies. 

The silly trifle opens with a Star Wars-style opening crawl that introduces one of the film's major themes as well as one of its biggest flaws: an unfortunate predilection for quantum science mumbo jumbo that I am either too stupid to understand or is, in fact, mostly incomprehensible. 

I'm guessing it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. The technical jargon otherwise comes out of the mouth of protagonist Toby (Jeff Kenny). He’s a hunky nerd with the looks and vibes of a latter-day Deedle brother and the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer. 

Toby even names his drug-infused home brew after Oppenheimer. But he’s not the only famous scientist Toby digs. In his dorm room Toby has that famous poster of Albert Einstein with his tongue out. 

Get a load of this silly billy!

That Einstein was quite a scamp! He was a mischievous man-child, a brainiac goofball. And we would never have known it if he hadn't taken that picture with his tongue out. Instead we would have thought that he was like other scientists, who would never even think of sticking their tongue out and waggling it in a playful, child-like fashion, let alone being photographed in the act. 

Toby isn’t one of these boring, serious scientists. Instead he’s a “fun” scientist who looks and acts like a surfer-stoner-slacker dude except that he’s a genius with the secret of existence locked up in that big, beautiful brain of his. 

The torturously titled genre-mash-up’s promising premise has Toby and sorority girl Kara (Lexie Lowell) wake up after a night of blackout sex to discover that everyone else in the world is gone. 

Toby and Kara meet gross, incidentally, when, during a Halloween party she drunkenly bursts into a similarly inebriated Toby’s room and boozily relieves him of his virginity. 

It’s a problematic introduction that’s part ambiguous sex crime and part Letters to Penthouse erotic fantasy. 

Kara wakes up to discover that she’s apparently had sex with a complete stranger who has a sex doll in his room. Even more alarmingly, pretty much everyone else in the world has disappeared. 

Being the smartest man in the world, Toby thinks he has it figured out. He speculates that the rest of humanity has been uploaded to a cloud, either metaphorically or literally, and that they just need to drive to Florida in order to join the rest of their brethren. 

They are pursued by a mysterious sentient piece of AI who looks and exactly like Hugo Weaving’s iconic Agent Smith from The Matrix but with a high, squeaky voice.

The filmmakers might have deluded themselves into thinking that they are parodying The Matrix with this character. Parody is of course protected speech under the first amendment but Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime doesn’t satirize or spoof The Matrix so much as it lazily steals its antagonist.

There are a surprising number of actors and roles listed in the end credits but Toby and Kara are the only characters onscreen ninety percent of the time. 

Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime is a two-hander whose creative decisions all seem inspired by a need to cut corners and make a movie about the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that results in the disappearance of 99.9999999999999999999999 percent of humanity as cheaply and easily as possible. 

One of the great joys and primary pleasures of road movies lies in getting to see the majesty and beauty of our sometimes great land. Not in Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime. 

To save money most of the film is a tight two shot of Toby and Kara inside a small car. In a colossal act of chutzpah, Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime is a movie about a road trip that feels like it was filmed entirely in someone’s garage, then beefed up with some very primitive green screen. 

When we do see anything outside Toby’s car it’s blurry and indistinct, not unlike the script’s characterizations. The movie misses out on a chance to show the fun side of everyone else being gone, like being able to read all the books you want, assuming that you don’t disastrously step on your glasses and crush them almost immediately.   

Alas, it would cost money to film scenes anywhere but inside a claustrophobic automobile so we stay in that stupid fucking car throughout the movie. 

Romantic comedy formula dictates that very different people at first despise one another but grow to like and then love one another as they grow closer through some manner of shared crisis. 

It’s easy to see why these glib caricatures might not get along. It's less clear what they see in each other. Their chemistry in non-existent and they aren’t just the male and female romantic leads: they pretty much ARE the movie. 

Kenny gets to deliver science jargon-laden monologues of various degrees of coherence while Lowell’s big speeches involve her crisis of faith and complicated feelings about molested by a priest at her Catholic School when she was fifteen. 

It’s something that clearly traumatized her but also turned her on, as we learn during a sexual fantasy where Kara thinks that Toby is the child molester who awoke her libidinal stirrings and gets frisky.

I know that people often do have complicated, contradictory responses to being molested or sexually assaulted, and that they include fetishizing elements of their trauma but Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime seems disconcertingly turned on by its female lead being sexually assaulted while wearing the Catholic schoolgirl uniform she wears throughout Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime. 

The filmmakers provide a narrative context for her outfit—she was wearing it to a Halloween party the night before—but that doesn’t make her blatant objectification any less egregious. 

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime lasts an hour and forty one minutes. Even more appallingly, it ends on a cliffhanger promising a sequel. 

Needless to say, that did not happen and it should not happen. This pointless saga should end here but then again it never should have begun in the first place. 

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