Ash (2025)
Alien Sedition Act
Let’s talk about canned soup. Sometimes we settle for an ultra-condensed, store-brand Jell-O block that, with a couple of hearty shakes, schlunks into the bowl. Name brands provide more expensive versions of the same stuff, but with a more dignified pour and ingredients that resemble actual food. Restaurant soup is always a gamble; unless you pull up a stool in the kitchen, there’s no telling if the chef de cuisine is spot-checking ingredients or microwaving Progresso. You could stay home and make soup from scratch, I suppose, but that would leave less time for more fulfilling activities–like reading movie reviews.
Movies are like soup. Low-budget studios (Troma, Full Moon, The Asylum, etc.) practically invented the high-carb, salty garbage market with direct-to-video genre films and mainstream blockbuster knock-offs–the movie equivalent of comfort food. Big studios run the gamut of pricey action flicks and prestige Awards Season fare, always teasing familiarity with just enough freshness to warrant leaving the house. The ones you’ve gotta watch out for are low-to-mid-budget releases like Ash, whose presence in cineplexes can signify a quality movie; it can also signify the opposite.
The film, directed by Flying Lotus, is often a pleasure to look at and listen to. It opens with a quick-cut montage of horrific memories flooding the brain of deep-space explorer Riya (Eiza González), as she regains consciousness. The imaginatively realized visions include the gruesome deaths of her shipmates, unfathomable alien landscapes, and bloody fights in which she may or may not have been the aggressor.
The team’s mission was part of a last-ditch effort for mankind to find a habitable Earth alternative. Now Riya, suffering amnesia, finds herself alone on a desolate planet in a corpse-strewn ship…except for the stranger who wants to get inside, and the one crew member whose body has yet to be found. The stranger turns out to be Brion (Aaron Paul), a fellow traveler whose job is to monitor the ground expedition from orbit. When communications went south, he decided to investigate, and must now try to get Riya and himself back to the main ship before the damaged life support system deprives them of oxygen.
Riya’s recollection of Brion is sketchy, and his presence seems to intensify the disorienting, physically painful flashbacks. A digital neck Band-Aid (cooler than it sounds) helps ease the episodes, but Riya begins to wonder if her newfound friend’s insistence on her wearing it may be an attempt to protect some terrible secret buried in her mind. Medical-futurism fetishists will find a lot to ogle in Ash. Brion brings with him a briefcase that opens up into a comical, all-purpose surgery-bot that, after completing an autopsy, displays a “Sorry for your loss” message. It’s not truly a spoiler (and certainly not a surprise) that a character will use this machine to remove an obtrusive alien lifeform from his/her body, since Ridley Scott did it better in Prometheus 13 years ago.
Speaking of the Alien franchise, Because this is an alien movie, we come to learn that there are aliens on the planet–nasty biomechanical creatures that like to make their way inside people and do terrible things. We also learn, through a choppy helmet-cam recording, that the crew discovered a giant alien structure while exploring the planet, and unwittingly awakened the very creatures that sabotaged their mission. If you assume there’ll be a showdown with the monster and a flamethrower, or that a lone survivor will rocket back into deep space, having vanquished the alien and all evidence of it…well, there’s no reason to seek out Ash.
This movie is Exhibit A as to why we need to stop funding (with our cash and attention) blatantly unoriginal time-sucks.
“Ian,” you might ask, “are you suggesting that filmmakers stop paying homage to the movies that inspired them?”
It’s not a suggestion. It’s an edict.
At least for those writers and directors who don’t understand the difference between an homage and a gussied-up rip-off. The line ranges from thick to invisible, but here’s a quick-start guide to help eagle-eyed viewers spot the difference, using Alien as an example:
Worthwhile Alien Homages: Europa Report, Event Horizon, Sunshine, Aliens
Skippable Alien Rip-offs: Life, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Romulus
It should come as no surprise that Neil Blomkamp (director of District 9, Chappie, Elysium) was an Executive Producer on Ash. He’d famously been tapped to direct Alien 5, before Ridley Scott cut in line to create a (doomed) Alien prequel trilogy. I don’t know how much influence Blomkamp had over Ash screenwriter Jonni Remmler, but it’s clear that both men were more interested in putting their own “spin” on the Xenomorph and The Thing than telling a marginally original story–or doing anything compelling with The Raid star Iko Uwais, who is not only wasted in his brief role as ship’s captain but whose fight scenes are shot primarily in jittery first-person close-up, which denies us the balletic scraps the actor is rightfully famous for.
The best praise I can give Ash is that it may be worth a rental, eventually, just to experience Flying Lotus’s mastery of image and sound; at times, these recall the best parts of Tarsem Singh’s clunky but arresting Silence of the Lambs knock-off, The Cell. Especially in the first twenty minutes, before Riya discovers the neck patches, the Grammy-winning director creates some truly disorienting aural tension, underscoring our heroine’s plight. Later, a character whose spacesuit has caught fire uses a gauntlet to smash a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, eradicating the flames and creating a uniquely impactful visual. And the flashbacks that open the film, wherein we see truly hellish visions of melting faces and otherworldly grotesqueries–well, I’ll just say that if Christopher Nolan ever decides to produce an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, there’s precisely one candidate to take the helm.
Whatever his next project, Flying Lotus should seek out a screenwriting gourmand whose talents can at least match, if not exceed, his own Michelin Star craftsmanship–instead of someone whose work here is a very different kind of schlunk in the bowl.
