Missing Hearts: A Dorothy and Tin Man Sci-Fi Adventure

Kit Wilson’s Missing Hearts is a sci-fi revamping of The Wizard of Oz, or at least some elements of it. Meaning, a young woman (an astronaut) lands up in a strange land (a planet untouched for the last 200 years) after a storm (engine meltdown) and befriends a tinman (a vintage robot left to languish after the last mission fell apart). 

With the clock ticking on Cassie’s (Chantel Frizzell) chances of survival on the pink-orange planet while her team launches a rescue mission, the plot is a feature’s worth of story packed into a 21-minute short. The film feels the heat of that task. By mostly confining itself to the shack that Hiru the robot (Jon Grossmann) has designated as his home (for the last 200 years 6 months and 19 minutes), it makes itself feel better paced than one would expect under the circumstances. There is a good deal of VFX use, what with the inclusion of space and spacecraft shots, not to mention the very environment of Hiru’s planet. 

Like his predecessor Tin Man, Hiru is all heart and compassion (and victim of oxidation). Driven by these qualities, he drives the narrative forward with his actions while simultaneously providing exposition that tells Cassie just how much trouble she is in—and how lonely Hiru’s existence is. In return, Cassie shares her own troubles, which admittedly look small in the face of fatal dust storms, dead compatriots, and two hundred years of purgatory, but they are her heartaches and have merit on that alone. Amidst this, the film fits in a brief lament for cinema and stories, forever in danger of rusting into obsolescence. Perhaps more so of late. The film is obviously a fan where The Wizard of Oz is concerned (Cassie is given a cheeky Guess we aren’t in Kansas anymore as well as a potted sunflower equivalent of Toto), but it also happily wears its I <3 movies badge. Look, for example, at Hiru’s introduction. Before he is revealed in his humanoid form, the robot’s first appearance sets you up to expect a Wall-E type and the subsequent introduction to his voice does not make the memory of disappointment go away. And thus Hiru gets the best of many worlds, being both cute and incomprehensibly wise, naive and critically skilled, grieved and yet rather unfamiliar with the labyrinths of human emotion. 

The overriding conflict in the plot comes from the fatal dust storms which carry deadly bacteria determined to wipe out all human life on the planet. With death looming on the story throughout, the bittersweet climax allows for Hiru’s efforts over the years to come to fruition and Cassie to return home. It is based on The Wizard of Oz, so of course it is sweet. And of course it is more complicated than that.