June 16

Day 16

Today kicks off the second half of this year’s June Swoon 5 with a sci-fi/horror film on Hulu called Ash. Directed and scored by Flying Lotus, a DJ, rapper, filmmaker and record producer, Ash feels like a mixed bag.

According to IMDB, “A woman wakes up on a distant planet and finds the crew of her space station viciously killed. Her investigation into what happened sets in motion a terrifying chain of events.“

The good parts of Ash included the lead performance from Eiza González as Riya, the woman who wakes up and is confused by the gore and death around her. González did a very strong job of expressing her confusion and fear of the situation that she found herself in.

Another positive is the look and the sound of the film. The score made the film standout from some of the other entries in the subgenre of space monster/horror. The score kept the audience on their toes and uneasy as the mysteries unfurled around Riya. The film’s special effects and imagery was also top notch as everything, especially the body horror aspects of the film, looked specifically frightening or horrendous.

The biggest problem is that this movie, story wise, does not even try to attempt something different than what we have seen before. There are scenes that feel as if they were taken directly out of Alien or The Thing or Event Horizon or Cloverfield: Paradox or many other space monster films.

The film leaned hard on cliches throughout the entire movie. Riya had amnesia at the beginning after awakening to find everyone dead. I mean… was there ever any question about what had happened here? Aaron Paul’s character Brion was very cliche as well. The only thing not cliche about him was that he spelled his name with an “o” instead of an “a.”

The film was only 1 hour and 35 minutes long, but it felt much longer than that. It dragged through the first two thirds of the movie before a fairly spry final act helped pick up the action. I am not opposed to slow burns, but there needed to be something more entertaining during that slow burn to engage my mind. This did not have it.

The film looked great, sounded great and had a decent lead performance, but there is just not enough of anything else to make this anything but a forgettable flick.