IM Review – Netflix's post-cataclysmic adventure aims high, lands in the middle | Movie

IIn his promotional texts, Netflix describes his latest original film, IO, as it unfolds on "post-cataclysmic" Earth. It's an appropriate description – somewhere between calamity and complete apocalypse – for a movie that does not really know what it wants to be. Too measured and quiet for a post-apocalyptic thriller, but too barren for an epic time-travel and Christopher Nolan-style space, IO seems closer to the film The Martian in that it's focuses primarily on the courage and resourcefulness of a person to support and grow plants a ruthless place.

And the Earth in IO is ruthless, an uncontrollable land filled with abandoned cars and rotting cartons after "an unexpected change in the composition of the atmosphere" smothering humans or dragging them into space. Most surviving humans reside on a space station orbiting IO, the deepest moon of Jupiter (also the name of one of Zeus' dead lovers), and your first clue that the film pours Greek mythology in all other scenes).

All have left Earth with the exception of Sam (The Leftovers Margaret Qualley), the daughter of a scientist who meticulously keeps bees and studies genetics, alone, on top of a mountain in one of the last pockets of air of the Earth. Sam occupies his days filled with data, e-mails addressed to his boyfriend (named Elon), residing at IO, and occasional visits to the Zone, an abandoned town accessible only by ATV and oxygen mask. Although she regards this "cataclysmic event" as "just our planet desperately trying to survive by expelling us," Sam is steadfastly attached to the Earth. Although Elon has urged him to catch a last Exodus shuttle for IO, she is attached to the silent planet, although it is complicated by the unexpected arrival of another solo survivor, Micah (Anthony Mackie).

Isolated, full of hope, marked by light years of desire, love and loss – and thus covering all the major themes of the epics of space – Sam and Micah develop a cautious link, and what happens is a film alternately empathetic and incoherent. Long looks, clbadical music, landscape shots and meditations on Greek mythology suddenly collide with storms, bursts of rage lined with information and badual tension. But the relationship between Sam and Micah has its own gravity, although IO does not always know in what world she wants to be, nor what are her parameters.

About these settings – Netflix's rising content budget is getting really decent sets, but IO leaves some questions about the scale of the cataclysm that can not be entirely blamed on the lack of understanding of science. For example, we are supposed to believe that smog so smothered the Earth that she left glbades of wine stained red on restaurant tables, but billboards advertising Exodus mark the roads still clear.

All of these inconsistencies, however, may not lead to much, as IO intelligently keeps the story around Sam and Micah. Qualley, like Sam, is wide and observable; she does not quite have the indefinable presence by Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games, but it gives depth to Sam's determination, though his logic may be fuzzy. Mackie, as Micah, gives Gravitas a poorly written tone, and effectively signals TRACE TWISTS when he raises his voice. Together, especially when they are opposed to toxic risks, both can be convincing. it is only when they are bound by novelistic or change arguments that worn-out spots in the construction of IO appear.

But that does not stop the film, whose production budget, the recognizable but non-megawatt cast, and the total commitment to sudden twists in the screenplay make it an original Netflix perfectly suited to streaming, anytime and everywhere. A decent use of an hour and a half, IO may not know what story he is telling, but as he stands on the Earth today, he knows exactly what it belongs to.