The Reel Review
A crewmember awakens with amnesia on her spaceship on a remote planet, discovering that the rest of the ship’s crew has been viciously killed. As her memories gradually return in small bits, she starts to question whether maybe she was the one that killed her crew. Eiza Gonzales (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Baby Driver) and Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) star in this sci-fi/mystery body horror.
Ash has the feel of a video game fever dream, borrowing heavily from a slew of other, much better sci-fi films like Alien and The Thing, but with cheap, low-budget sets and a distractingly pretty protagonist who is totally unconvincing in the lead role. Even Aaron Paul and Indonesian martial arts star-turned actor Iko Uwais (Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, Mile 22) seems lost with very little to do.
Music composer Flying Lotus, in his feature directing debut, seems to be more focused on trippy visuals and a trippy score than in telling a coherent story, making his wacky, poorly paced, hour-and-a-half music video a rare double whammy of being both boring and tediously annoying. The third act is a body horror extravaganza, featuring a knockoff of one of the key scenes in Prometheus, just with a surgical device that sounds eerily like a Japanese rice cooker. Terrible film.
REEL FACTS
• Director Flying Lotus also appears in Ash as crewmember Davis.
• Originally Tessa Thompson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were set to star in the film.
• Ash was filmed in New Zealand.
Video & Photo
