Mondays, am I right? First you wake up on an alien planet in an outpost that’s leaking oxygen, surrounded by the bloody remains of your co-workers who you probably killed. Then I swear it’s all downhill from there. Don’t even ask me to bury their bodies until I’ve had my coffee! You wouldn’t like me when I’m cranky. I mean, you really wouldn’t like me.
“Ash” is a sci-fi/horror movie in the vein of “Alien” and “Planet of the Vampires” and “Galaxy of Terror” and “Pandorum” and “Event Horizon” and “The Thing” and “Leviathan” and “Screamers” and “The Cloverfield Paradox” and “Alien Cargo” and “Dracula 3000” and “Leprechaun 4: In Space.” It’s also clear that some of the people in the production liked playing “Dead Space,” “Doom,” “System Shock,” and/or “Portal,” to name a few. It’s hard to come up with new ideas in a well-worn subgenre. You almost have the give the filmmakers credit for admitting defeat and doubling down on familiar schtick.
Eiza González stars as Riya, the amnesiac in question. She has to solve the mystery of where she is, what she’s doing there, why everyone else is dead and how to get back to Earth. Another crew member, Brion (Aaron Paul), arrives from orbit to check in on her, and explains that they’re part of a mission to find a habitable planet because — surprising no one — mankind completely screwed up and Earth can’t sustain life much longer. The only thing implausible about this set-up is that destroying the planet took so long we had time to build spaceships and travel the stars. (At this rate, given the current administration, it may only take a couple of years.)
Riya and Brion have to fix the outpost and stay alive until their shuttle aligns with an orbiting ship, so they can get off of this godforsaken planet — KOI-442, but because it’s the title of the movie, they call it “Ash.” Also one of the other crew members is missing, and even though Riya has flashbacks about killing her friends and co-workers, maybe that other person is the real bad guy here? Ain’t no herring like a red herring, I always say.
It takes a long time to finally reveal what really happened and the true nature of the horror. A really long time. What’s frustrating is that when the answers finally come, “Ash” turns out to have a few new ideas after all. We just don’t have time to explore any of them because we spent more than half the film puttering around, solving tech problems, and spouting vague, ominous dialogue. The good stuff, and we do eventually get to it, is backloaded and never gets to shine, except for one monster effect that is, to be fair, grotesque and noteworthy.
“Ash” comes courtesy of musician and filmmaker Flying Lotus, who composed bumper music for Adult Swim and directed the feature film “Kuso.” He also directed “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” a truly demented and demonic installment of the horror anthology “V/H/S99” inspired by the kids TV series “Double Dare.” He’s got a luscious and colorful visual style and a flare for the grotesque. Several design elements in “Ash” stand out, including a creepy automatic surgery machine with an interface that looks like a Tamagotchi, and space suits that are beautifully insectoid, evoking the iconic mutants in Jack Arnold’s “This Island Earth.”
“Ash” is a colorful production, masking its low-budget with Fulci-esque palettes. Flying Lotus’s electronic score is eerie and pulsing, as though it was written in the early 1980s and fell through a wormhole. Had the whole film been produced in retro lo-fidelity, it may have smoothed over the predictability of its plot, and let us truly become immersed in its world, highlighting all the strange little details. But it’s a slick production, and that slickness only calls attention to how sparse and empty the characters, their world and their circumstances truly are.
There are worse sci-fi/horror movies, but “there are worse movies” is never the praise one likes to think it is. The word “Competent!” rarely makes it into a movie’s marketing materials no matter how accurate it is. But “Ash” is indeed competent. Unremarkably written but attractively realized, with effective performances and a few exciting, weird moments right near the end.
If the film achieves nothing else, it teaches a valuable lesson: If you’ve got good stuff to show us, show us the good stuff. Don’t make us trudge through generic clichés first, leaving very little time to enjoy the best parts of your movie, while we’re too sleepy to care.
