Europa Report is a 2013 American science fiction film directed by Sebastián Cordero and written by Philip Gelatt.
It stars Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvist, Daniel Wu, Karolina Wydra, and Sharlto Copley.
A found footage film, it recounts the fictional story of the first crewed mission to Europa, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter.
Despite a disastrous technical failure that causes the loss of all communications with Earth, and a series of further crises, the crew continues its mission to Europa and finds mounting evidence of life on the moon.
Six astronauts embark on a privately funded mission to Jupiter's moon Europa in an attempt to find extraterrestrial life.
[4] The crew members are commander William Xu, pilot Rosa Dasque, chief science officer Daniel Luxembourg, marine biology science officer Katya Petrovna, junior engineer James Corrigan, and chief engineer Andrei Blok.
As the lander hurtles back to Europa's surface, Xu unbuckles from his seat to dump water shielding to reduce the impact speed.
Instead, he manages to fix the communication link to the orbiting mother ship, at the expense of turning off the life support systems.
[5] The space ship was designed through computer graphics, giving high detail to the camera angles to be used in the film.
For accuracy, the depiction of Europa was based on data from NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) maps of the moon's surface.
The visual effects supervisor stated that the creature was based on a cross of an octopus and a squid, with early sketches resembling a jellyfish and a manta ray.
[10] Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for The New York Times, liked that the movie worked to stay realistic, and found the pairing of Caballero's production design and Chediak's cinematography to be effective.