Post-apocalyptic movies are never exactly meant to be a pleasant experience, though IO, one of Netflix’s earliest 2019 releases, is an exceptionally grim experience that looks to suck the happiness right out of anyone who watches it. It’s a movie devoid of a soul, with not one shred of the hope certain characters claim to have, nor at any point does it seem to really care about actually engaging its audience, or present any ideas that are worthwhile.
The film takes place on an Earth that has been overrun with toxic air, with everyone having relocated to a space station on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. A woman named Sam (Margaret Qualley), remains in one of Earth’s high altitude sections, where the air is still breathable, raising bees, hoping to use their pollen to produce oxygen-producing plants to clean the Earth’s air. She’s soon joined by Micah (Anthony Mackie), who’s been traveling the Earth via a helium balloon and is ready to make the jump to Io, but first wants to talk to Sam’s father, Dr. Harry Walden (Danny Huston), who unbeknownst to him, had already died, but convinced a group of people to stay on Earth because he still had hope to save the Earth.
What did this brilliant man of science see on Earth that allowed him to convince people to risk their lives on a dying planet? Well, apparently nothing, other than just a feeling, which is something this movie doesn’t seem to think is a big deal. The movie seems to have a seriously twisted sense of logic by trying to get people to believe a man of science, facts, and reason would really in good conscience persuade people to stick around on a dying planet simply because he wants them to have a little faith. While Sam has this plan involving the bees, it seems to be something that she came up with on her own after the fact, and in essence, Dr. Harry had nothing to go off of when asking people to risk their lives.
Harry’s lack of a plan really serves as a metaphor for how aimless this movie is overall. The movie only has a run time of 96 minutes, but maybe only twenty of those are actually filled with anything resembling a plot. Once Mackie appears - which doesn’t take that long - the film essentially stalls, only devoting an occasional line here and there to a plot point, before going back to wandering around like it doesn’t have a clue, only to revisit the actual story in the last twenty minutes or so, and even then, barely anything happens.
This movie is mostly 96 minutes of two people sitting around and talking. And this would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that they speak about nothing relevant to the plot. They’re just engaged in a series of mundane conversations for nearly all the movie, getting into petty disagreements and arguments. And while movies like Clerks or Pulp Fiction (or honestly, any Quentin Tarantino movie) have pulled off devoting so much time to conversations that aren’t relevant to the plot, they’re at least engaging discussions about unique topics that engage in moral and ethical debates, with a dose of humor injected throughout.
The conversations in IO, though, are frankly boring. They don’t actually discuss anything. Instead, they’ll quote philosophers and make reference to physics theories in an attempt to sound deep and meaningful, but they don’t actually really make any keen observations on these quotes. They just say them and expect the audience to just “get it.” It mostly feels condescending, with this air of pretentiousness where it thinks its smarter than it actually is. It feels more like a child who skimmed through their father’s book and rattled off the first couple of things to sound like it knows what it’s talking about, when really, it doesn’t have a clue.
The acting in this movie is lazy as well, and it’s debatable whether either Qualley or Mackey truly cared to even be present for this. Qualley is totally flat, and her delivery never matches the nature of the lines she’s reciting. She’ll have these jarring emotional shifts that essentially have no purpose, other than to create the illusion of drama. She’ll suddenly get angry after hearing a mundane line, and at one point, oddly breaks out in laughter over something that wasn’t even funny, almost like the movie left one of the bloopers in the final cut by accident. Mackie, a normally really solid actor who’s been finding himself some really strong roles as of late, is monotone for nearly all this movie. He’s meant to be a super-serious character, but this movie seems to think “serious” means “to not have any emotion whatsoever,” as he consistently stays at the same tone of voice for nearly the entire movie. Normally, he can be calm, cool, and collected and it helps give a particular movie a burst of energy, but here he lacks all the energy.
The film also contains literally zero character development for either character. For a movie that focuses on most of the world being empty, neither character seems to suffer from any sort of trauma from being so alone, as one would think someone would go through not too long after a crisis. The characters speak so nonchalantly throughout this movie that it’s almost easy to forget that it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world. And even as the movie nears its end, the characters don’t learn anything, nor do they grow. They start and end this movie as literally the same exact people. There’s an odd break where the film goes into a brief romantic subplot - which feels especially odd as Qualley and Mackie have no chemistry at all - but the film abandons that idea as quickly as it presented it, and this movie ends with two characters who feel like they’ve learned absolutely nothing.
Like the world its set in, IO is devoid of any life. It’s unnecessarily grim, with two phoned-in performances by actors who clearly don’t care to be there. It’s completely aimless, filling most of its run time with pointless, mundane conversations that go nowhere and try to give off the air of being deeper than it actually is. Its logic makes no sense, its plot is borderline nonexistent, and its characters remaining exactly the same, IO is literally the definition of a waste of time.
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