Infini (2015)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Daniel MacPherson, Grace Huang, Luke Hemsworth
Directed by Shane Abbess
I’ve always been a sucker for a good old-fashioned sci-fi thriller – sure, it can have tidy little bits of the horror genre sprinkled over the top of it, simply because in space…no one will save your ass (wasn’t that a tagline)? In any fashion, the prospect of a troublesome atmosphere becomes that much more terrifying when you’re light years away from assistance -simply put, on a ship, if you’re going to get whacked, EVERYONE will sooner or later, therefore…frightening elements abound.
In Shane Abbess’s outer-space shocker Infini, we travel a lunar route that has been used plenty of times previously: a ragtag group of bad-asses is shot out into the black silent abyss in order to rescue a lone miner named Whit Carmichael (MacPherson) who has been abandoned on the rock he was working on after an outbreak decimated the remainder of the populous. The financial system has been reduced to ashes (symbolic, indeed), and gutsy souls are offered the opportunity to score some big bucks by “traveling” to these remote mining facilities for some hardcore labor. Now you might have noticed my quotations around the word “traveling” (see, there they are again) – now, if it was a simple as traveling to your work site, you wouldn’t rake in the moolah. so you’ll undertake in a dangerous new method of transportation called slip-streaming. It’s a borderline-take on teleportation, and it’s deadly as hell if something goes wrong…kind of like riding with a demented Uber-driver.
So here’s Whit, stuck on this boulder from nowhere, waiting for his small army of saviors to rescue him, and shortly after they land, does he decide to inform them that an infectious parasite of sorts is boring into it’s hosts bloodlines and taking over their minds – NOW you tell them this? As expected, our team of losers and loners starts getting done dirty by the relentless bloodsucker, and the violence quotient takes a precipitous upswing. The bad part, you ask? Well, upon traversing into the second act of this presentation, your violence-meter will drop like a stone in the toilet – long, drawn out stretches of dialogue will overtake the action pieces, rendering you on the brink of unconsciousness, finally before stomping hard on the accelerator in the movie’s closing acts and delivering a mind-bending experience that will leave some scratching their melons for a short time afterwards.
Performance-wise, MacPherson is on the mark as Whit, and oddly enough, he’s one of, if not the only character that seems to have his identity delved into, whereas the others simply serve as fodder for the beast – no worry however – it’s not a deal-breaker by any stretch. Visually, Abbess uses the gritty, grimy, blacked-out depths of space to enhance the movie’s scummy-top layers, and it delivers an eye-pleasing product, although not necessarily one we haven’t seen already. Overall, I could recommend Infini as a solid one-timer for those who love a little gratuitous violence with their sci-fi, just don’t expect to revolve this presentation on a continuous basis in your high-priced DVD-spinner machine.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
