IO is a 2019 sci-fi film about a young scientist who searches for a way to save a dying Earth, finding a connection with a man who’s racing to catch the last shuttle off the planet.
Our poor doomed planet in on the chopping block once again in director Jonathan Helpert‘s latest Netflix exclusive IO, a sometimes clever yet uneventful post-apocalyptic adventure that has a truly interesting story to tell despite the ways it’s done so. Bleak to a degree and purposefully isolated and empty, it is a rather simplistic experience that seeks to say much with very little.
In the future, Mother Nature has taken all she can from the most dominant species she hosts, making a shift in the environment so it’s nearly impossible for humans to survive. Reclaiming the land and air, it devastates the landscape, forcing those who can to abandon the planet in space ships, heading to the distant Jupiter moon of IO. Staying behind is scientist Sam Walden (Margaret Qualley), who, like her famous father Harry (Danny Huston), believes Earth is not dying but simply evolving and there is a chance we could, too. Meanwhile, in all this arrives Micah (Anthony Mackie), urging Sam to join him on the last shuttle off the surface. However, there are truths unknown between them that change everything.
Beginning with a sort of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within vibe, we watch Sam in her protective hazmat suit scrounging about a gutted museum in New York City, discovering that some strands of insects appear to be making a comeback. She then heads off to her far away camp in the hills where the air is still mostly breathable (and she’s breeding a new strand of honey bee), studying samples and listening to tapes of her father and messages from up in space. She’s all alone and there’s a genuine sense of solitude and habit about her existence as she goes about her daily routines both in the safety of her camp and the dismal ruins of her city stomping grounds.
Clearly, Helpert isn’t working with a big budget, and as such, wisely avoids going large scale, a mistake often made in this genre by those with no money to pad it out. This is a story of loneliness and commitment, balancing on a timeline where Sam has only a few days to make a choice: stay and die or join the others in a race for a new world. It’s a compelling notion and IO does have some solid moments that are convincing, especially in the earlier scene with Sam all by herself.
It all begins to lose its traction though after Micah arrives, the film pensive and heavy with not much action to give it momentum. Both Mackey and Qualley have some weight behind their performances, yet can’t register enough umph together to make it really matter. The battle for saving Earth becomes slightly secondary as the two characters find some romance and contemplate the philosophies of such but it’s never all that connective or emotional even as it has all the right parts to make it so.
Fans of talky slow-paced sci-fi stories may get enough out of this to merit a look, and admittedly, there are several key moments that make that work very well. Otherwise, this tries to spin a hopeful tale that just kind of plods along to an ending that lacks the punch it seems to ready to deliver.