“It ain’t rocket science” or so the old saying goes, but rocket science is exactly what French engineer Didier Mathure (Melvil Poupaud, Summer of 85) is engaged in when his career unexpectedly crashes and burns – along with the rocket he’s poured the last several years of his career into.
With the government investigating exactly what went wrong with their multi-million dollar space launch, Mathure is given a new assignment to keep him out of the way until the dust settles – heading up GEPAN, the Groupe d’Études des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés or, in English, the unidentified aerospace phenomenon research group – the department of the French government that investigates flying saucers.
Now, you might expect our hero to find himself mixed up in some conspiratorial spookiness in the vein of Project Blue Book or The X-Files. Instead, he finds himself relegated to a dowdy office and leading a crew of amiable misfits, including enthusiastic young nerd Rémy (Quentin Dolmaire, Godard Mon Amour), cheerfully spacey receptionist Véra (Daphne Patakia, Benedetta) and surly ex-cop Marcel (Michel Vuillermoz, Angels in America), and working his way through a backlog of eyewitness reports of strange lights in the sky from an array of eccentrics – quite a fall from grace.
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