But Blake’s own personal mission is to find her father - yes, “Tides” is also a “Space Dad” movie - an astronaut sent on the first mission to Earth, who was never heard from again despite the rash promises he makes to Louise in curiously unmoving flashbacks. Since the humans back on Kepler have become sterile (add “biological” to the row of clocks above), the most crucial part of Blake’s mission is to see if Mama Earth will work her old magic and allow them to reproduce once again. The scavengers are a tribe of survivors, and even more surprisingly, there are children among them. Tide tables, inclement weather, weeping wounds, windows of communication: this is perhaps a surfeit of deadlines, but you can never have too many loudly ticking clocks, right? They come to in a dungeon/well that fills up quickly at high tide, with the luckless Tucker in dire need of medical attention. She has six hours till the tides come back in and four hours till they’re due to send word back to Kepler-209, but she’s only been gone a bit when a weird weather front starts rolling in and a, say it with me, roving band of scavengers takes both her and Tucker hostage.

Blake, however survives mostly unscathed and so takes it on herself to go out alone on the first recon mission. The other, Tucker (Sope Dirisu) is injured. Hurtling toward the earth’s surface as part of a mission to see if it might be safe to return, something has gone wrong with the capsule. Born and raised on Kepler-209, the planet to which Earth’s “ruling elite” fled when the world flooded, as the film opens Blake looks to have mere seconds to live back on the Blue Planet. Not so astronaut Louise Blake (Nora Arnezeder).

Tides of war not working