Review: "Awake"

I checked, and the idea for "Awake" originated in 2019, well before the coronavirus outbreak. I wanted to be sure, since it seems like a creepily accurate encapsulation of our anxiety-ridden, sleep-deprived times.

Gina Rodriguez stars in this science fiction story that registers closer to cautionary tale than technological fantasy. A mysterious global event results in the shutdown of all our fancy technology, which is a pain but fixable. But another, more serious side effect soon rears its head: nobody can sleep. 

The scientists are baffled. People still get tired, and their cognitive abilities rapidly decline. But no matter how exhausted and frustrated they get, they cannot sleep. And this is not just an annoyance: the human brain needs downtime, and without it will swell and cause erratic behavior and eventually... kill the person.

So this is actually an extinction event, with a few people racing against time to find a cure.

Rodriguez plays Jill, a former soldier who was drummed out of the service for drug addiction, though she still serves in the reserves and works security in a quasi-military laboratory. A single mom with two kids -- adorable moppet Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) and reliably disengaged teen Noah (Lucius Hoyos) -- Jill snatches expired pills from the medical waste bins to sell to drug dealers and pad her meager income.

Director Mark Raso, who cowrote the screenplay with his brother, Joseph, based on a story by Gregory Poirier, puts us immediately into the action a few minutes into the movie, and uses the events to build characterization rather than dilly-dally with a lot of endless, needless exposition, unlike some other Netflix creatives.

(Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, "Shadow and Bone.")

Jill's car suddenly dies along with everyone else's, an accident pitching them into a lake from which they barely escape. Matilda actually drowns, but is luckily revived by a sheriff's deputy involved in the fracas.

People soon do all the thing panicked people do: buy out groceries, raid pharmacies for sleeping pills that do not work, get into arguments that turn into scraps that turn into deadly melees. Jill tries to keep it together, even going into work, but learns that the Army doctor with a dark past (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who helped her get her job is leaving with a special unit investigating something miraculous: a woman who can sleep.

Turns out Matilda can, too, which immediately makes her a unicorn in a world suddenly very suspicious of anything or anyone different. Jill tries to hide Matilda's status, but it is discovered when her religious mother-in-law (Frances Fisher) takes the girl to her church to be prayed over. 

This results in a truly harrowing and haunting sequence where the well-meaning preacher (Barry Pepper) tries to lead his flock to peace and faith rather than accusations and conflict. Look around at the real world right now -- how do you think that works out?

There are moments of hope, such as getting a bitchin' 1970s Dodge sedan running -- older cars, with their lack of digital add-ons, are less vulnerable -- and running into a prison convict (Shamier Anderson) who joins their crew, gifting himself the name of their ride. He should be an enemy to be fought, but turns out to be the most amiable, reliable person they'll meet. 

Things go on from there. At 96 minutes, "Awake" is fast-paced and energetic, but also finds moments to quietly ratchet up the suspense and sense of foreboding. Jill shows her mettle as a warrior mom determined to protect her children from all comers, even though everyone (and herself) find they can no longer think straight. 

It's basically a twist on the familiar zombie apocalypse, but instead of the dead eating the living, we let our failings and fears consume us from within. Again, sound familiar??

"Awake" is a tidy little thriller that scares us with the immediate perils Jill and her family will face, and on a deeper level with the implications of their catastrophe, which seems like a descending staircase with no turning. 

Remember, it's always darkest just before it becomes pitch black.

Review: "Stowaway"

 

 

There’s a particular kind of movie, often a science fiction film, that has percolated up. The technological and situational challenges drive the emotional reactions, as astronauts or other extraordinary humans try to prevent catastrophic events with limited resources, time and capabilities.

“Apollo 13” is one of the earliest of this sort, and “Gravity,” “The Martian” and now “Stowaway” are its inheritors. They’re really procedurals in space -- trying to painstakingly assemble the pieces to the answer puzzle while certain mayhem is coming down at them, perhaps not imminently but inexorably.

(In a way, you could even argue the last two Avengers movies were space procedurals, with the focus on finding or hiding Infinity Stones to prevent the existential threat, represented as Thanos.)

Like the others, “Stowaway” is not long on characterization. We learn enough about the people we’re watching to understand where they come from and what motivates them, but not a lot of other background.

For example, star Anna Kendrick plays Zoe Levenson, who we know is 1) a doctor, who 2) went to Yale, and 3) initially applied to the Hyperion space program as a joke, and 4) that’s about it. The plot is what moves things along, with the actors finding little spaces to bring out the humanity. Kendrick gives her a sort of quiet, plucky charm -- geek girl as heroine.

Similarly, Toni Collette plays the commander of this mission to a future Mars colony, though I don’t think we ever even hear her name. (The credits give it as Marina Barnett.) She’s a veteran leading her third and last mission and is focused on tamping down miscues. Daniel Dae Kim is David Kim, a botanist who is married and follows the commander’s lead unquestioningly, until…

Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson) is the “until,” a launch engineer who somehow passed out on the ship before blastoff and was never detected. The problem is they only have enough stuff on board for three people, not four, and the CO2 exchanger thingamajig he was caught behind was damaged, so they’re all going to asphyxiate a few weeks before reaching Mars unless Michael… goes away.

The dilemma: find a way to fix the problem so everyone can live, or present Michael with the option of killing himself to save the crew.

Now, it seems pretty implausible that a NASA-like organization could misplace an entire person, what with their mile-long checklists and tracking devices and so on. But director Joe Penna, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ryan Morrison, focuses on the problem and brushes past how it was created.

There’s even a suggestion that maybe Michael’s stowaway status was not entirely accidental. He’s an aspiring astronaut himself, so is it possible he manipulated events to jump ahead of the line? There’s also the hint of attraction between him and Zoe, or at least a bond, so she pushes back against the commander’s plan to do away with him.

“Stowaway” has lots of potential story threads to pursue. For example, Michael is Black and blue-collar, whereas the crew is white and Asian and Ivy League. I kept waiting for some of the new awokening over racial justice to come to the fore -- after all, why should Michael be the one who has to sacrifice himself? Why is his life instantly assigned as less valuable than the others?

Other options present themselves, but every day that goes by with Michael breathing air leaves less margin of error for a solution to present itself. And that’s the sweet spot where the movie gradually, skillfully builds suspense.

One of the choices the filmmakers made that I really liked is for the audience not to witness any of the usual back-and-forth conversations with mission control. We just hear a little squawking over earpieces, so we have to make sense from just one side of the conversation. This heightens the claustrophobic feeling the crew is utterly alone, and their choices and mettle will decide their fate.

“Stowaway” isn’t an ‘exciting’ movie in the traditional sense. There aren’t a lot of action scenes, explosions, lasers, that kind stuff. Most of it is just people inside a cramped spaceship, dealing with impossible scenarios and agonizing over the consequences of their choices.

What would you do in such circumstances? And that’s why we watch.