400 Days
Entry updated 28 September 2026. Tagged: Film.
US film (2015). New Artists Alliance. Directed by Matt Osterman. Written by Osterman. Cast includes Grank Bowler, Tom Cavanagh, Dane Cook, Ben Feldman, Cathy Lotz and Brandon Routh. 90 minutes. Colour.
Four astronauts – Theo Cooper (Routh), Emily McTier (Lotz), Bug Kielowski (Feldman), and Cole Dvorak (Cook) – are placed in an Underground chamber for 400 days to simulate a planned mission to Mars and determine how a crew would react during such a Space Flight. As the weeks go on, there are a few conflicts, and the astronauts become withdrawn
and have occasional hallucinations; but there are two major disruptions to their daily routine. First, the regular radio messages they were receiving from family members and friends suddenly stop, which the astronauts assume is just part of the simulation, arranged by overseer Walter Anderson (Bowler), to give them an unexpected problem that might actually arise. Second, a ragged man breaks into their enclosure and later leaves. The astronauts decide to go out and investigate what is going on; they find a barren, dusty wasteland, but they suspect that this is somehow all part of the simulation. Moving on, they go into a town and meet a strange man named Zell (Cavanagh), who tells them that a large object struck the Moon, causing an enormous dust storm that devastated the Earth. In separate incidents, two of the astronauts vanish, and it is surmised that the desperate survivors of this disaster have turned to cannibalism. The other two astronauts then go back into their enclave and emerge again after 400 days, hearing a voice announcing that they have successfully completed the simulation. Though this is probably an automated response, the film does leave open the possibility that everything the astronauts experienced was indeed part of the simulation, though the enormity of the environment they travelled through makes that unlikely, and it is difficult to see why someone preparing astronauts for a space flight would subject them to a trek through a barren landscape with menacing cannibals.
Like many sf films of the 1950s, this films transitions from resembling a Spacesuit Film to becoming a horror movie (see Horror in SF), probably satisfying neither of the disparate audiences who appreciate these films. This reflects the common assumption in Hollywood that people are not interested in the boringly realistic activities of typical astronauts and must be entertained by colourful menaces like Aliens, Monsters, or demented cannibals. Surely an involving film could be made that focused exclusively on the lives of prospective astronauts enduring a prolonged simulated flight on Earth, but Osterman did not want to make it, or could not get financing to make it. The only mildly optimistic message in the film is that, aside from minor problems, astronauts would probably be able to survive the sorts of prolonged missions that will be probably be necessary to reach other planets. [GW]
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