Jason Reitman’s film about intimate relationships begins with a long view: specifically it’s the perspective on earth from six billion kilometres, the view from the Voyager space probe that inspired Carl Sagan’s musing on the significance (or otherwise) of the human race in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot. For more than 37 years, Voyager has carried messages, songs and artefacts for any intelligent life it might encounter out there. This prologue is narrated with typically wry/bemused detachment by Emma Thompson. We are about to see examples of how the human species muddles through existence despite its development of such sophisticated technology as Voyager or the internet. Has all this communication made us better able to connect? The lab rats here are the inhabitants of a