Riya Ortiz (Eiza González) wakes up on a scientific research base on an alien planet surrounded by bodies. With no memory of what happened, other than the terrifying suspicion she’s responsible, Riya struggles to work out what happened. And then, Brion (Aaron Paul) arrives…

Directed by DJ, record produce and rapper Flying Lotus, there’s not a single human created frame of Ash that isn’t beautiful. The station is drenched in blues and purples, the whirling vortex of the planet’s atmosphere is as beautiful as it is threatening. The suits fizz and hum with what seems to be bio-mechanical enhancements that lead to a viciously smart use of the suits to level the playing field in a brutal close-in fistfight. It’s a sweaty, tense movie punctuated by espresso dark humour and Gonzalez and Paul working incredibly hard. That work both reflected and assisted by a nicely chunky, hands on aesthetic that will make fans of Alien and Dead Space very happy.

Jonni Remmler’s script has some fun too, especially with the central premise. Ash is a pretty standard ‘We need to find a planet to evacuate to’ story that’s unafraid to deal with the human consequences of that and finds a couple of wrinkles I’ve never seen before. The mission is desperate, balanced on a knife edge and it makes a lot of what follows that first return to consciousness make sense. Remmler isn’t afraid to write characters who haven’t read the script or are unprepared for the big choices thrust on them and that somewhat offsets the janky gear changes from cerebral SF to frantic slasher. In fact there’s a major sequence here which completely changes tone from one to the other once you’ve got the context for it and that’s massively impressive, not to mention hard to do.

It’s a shame then that the movie’s numerous strong points are let down by a string of increasingly obvious, and in one case actively lazy, choices. The obvious comes from the third act, which sets up a compelling and unusual problem and then decides to re-stage the finale of Prometheus on a smaller scale. At the exact moment you think it’s going to do something fun, the movie reaches for the most obvious choice imaginable. Then it does it again in a mid-credits scene which is either a set up for a sequel or an entirely predictable ‘OR IS IT?!’ moment.

Worst of all though is some blatant, and unsuccessful uses of AI. There are still images in the finale that are clearly AI generated and the moment you see them you can’t unsee them, and worse, not wonder if there’s a lot of other stuff in the movie you didn’t notice. Here’s Lotus, talking to Filmmaker Magazine, about AI:

‘People are scared, and I can’t blame them. But at the same time, I come from the music world. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when it wasn’t cool to make music on a computer—that was a compromise. Same deal with CGI, at first. I understand the knee-jerk reaction, but this might not be the hill to die on. There’s not a space for the conversation in a creative sense yet. It’s all still soundbites, people looking for the one quote to sum it up. I can see every aspect of the issue.’

Respectfully, I disagree, with the idea that there isn’t a conversation worth having yet, that he can see every aspect of the issue and its usage. The environmental cost is especially egregious in a movie like this, but most of all it reads like a betrayal of the sort of low-cost, high energy pulp cinema Ash very nearly is. You can’t salute the Alien franchise if you’ve run it all through ChatGPT. You can’t homage the thing with a machine trained on stolen art. The individuality of creativity can’t be homogenised and when it is, you get moments like the third act here. An act so clunky it throws you out of the movie and you find yourself seeing nothing but the other flaws like the wasted supporting cast and the slow pace and wondering where the money that was supposedly saved by using AI actually went.

Verdict: It’s a shame, especially as a lot of Ash is very nicely done and I’m always here for a good 94 minute pulpy sprint through the worst bits of space. But this is an expedition that’s flawed from the jump and those flaws all start behind the camera. 5/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Ash is available now on Prime Video

 

Sources:

http://filmmakermagazine.com/130125-interview-flying-lotus-steve-ellison-ash/