When does your inspiration become so heavy that the creation ceases to have an existence on its own? American music producer turned filmmaker Flying Lotus’ (popularly known as FlyLo) “Ash” is a sci-fi horror that never offers a shred of originality. I mean filmmakers have been inspired by other movies for as long as the beginning of motion picture itself. Still, when your final product has nothing to offer beyond just elevated horror vibes, there’s a big hole in the continuum that cannot be filled.
The plot of “Ash” follows Riya (Eiza González), an astronaut who wakes up in her space station with her memory almost completely wiped out. Her physical attributes, her training, and her work are still intact in her core, but whatever wiped out all of her crew, who she finds splattered around the space vessel with their heads smashed to smithereens, is nowhere to be found and she doesn’t remember it either. Unable to understand what happened, Riya starts to investigate. Certain clues and random access to jumpscare-like memory jolts help her understand that one of her crew members Clarke (Kate Elliott) is at large. When Brion (Aaron Paul), a member of her extended crew working at a nearby space station arrives, things start becoming a little clearer. Or should I say more delusional?
The question is that the chaos on the space station might also be because of Riya’s paranoia – being on the planet for so long; possibly inhaling toxic gases – are all possibilities up for a toss. But since the crew was there to colonize the planet and Riya’s amnesia is flashing and diverting her, we spend most of the film’s 90-minute runtime just going around the ship. The discoveries are plodding and to be completely frank, replaceable with a set of images of a person moving around their house with nothing else to do.
The science in the film is pedestrian, the set design extremely basic, and González, who usually has a very immersive, and intriguing screen presence wasted. It doesn’t help that director Flying Lotus (who also stars as one of the crew members) does not provide her character, or any other character for that matter, any kind of weight to make us care for this dull narrative.
The gorgeous cinematography that relies heavily on the neon-drenched lighting that signals constant dread also becomes weary and tiresome as the film plods along to the third act. Flying Lotus’ beautiful synth score feels out of the element here; feeling like it belongs in a completely different film altogether. The final act offers a few genuinely face-melting visuals and a couple of interesting design concepts, but other than that, the film fails to make you sit up and notice. Jonni Remmler’s writing is so vague and incoherent that the film succumbs to saying nothing at all. It’s a sin that the film wastes talents like Indonesian action-legend Iko Uwais on sequences that could have been filmed with anyone else on board.
The film laments all its inspiration up its sleeves – Ridley Scott’s “Alien” is of course the roadmap, but Flying Lotus seems more inspired by its low-budget followups that slowly but eventually killed the heart of Scott’s classic. Eventually, “Ash” becomes a potent example of a hollow sci-fi spectacle that tries to coast by on borrowed chills, but never does.
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