Back at the start of the year, Netflix made a big song and dance about how they’d be
releasing a new movie every week.
Well, they’ve stuck to that promise, albeit at a cost: what they didn’t make clear in
the marketing is that plenty of the movies would be duds.
I think you can see where this review is going.
Jill (Gina Rodriguez) is an ex-con who works night security shifts at a university and
has a side hustle in trafficking expired drugs out of the building for resale.
While driving her kids to school, a strange flash sparks in the sky, breaking all electronics,
apparently everywhere on Earth.
The resulting accident almost claims the life of her daughter, who thankfully makes it;
but the challenges are just beginning, as it transpires that people can no longer fall
asleep.
Except the daughter, which makes her of vital importance to government efforts to
stop further catastrophes.
Awake’s high-concept setting makes it ideal fodder for Netflix’s one-movie-a-week schtick,
and is reminiscent of a number of low-budget sci-fi movies they’ve pumped out of their
Originals department over the years.
The common threads are low production values, underbaked stories, at least one actor you
recognise, and a hooky concept that ends up disappointing.
We had Extinction, where Michael Pena faced off against alien soldiers, How It Ends, where
Forest Whitaker was a bad father-in-law *during the apocalypse*, and so on.
To its credit, Awake has a far better central idea than those movies; to its detriment,
it has no idea what to do with it.
As it becomes apparent that nobody can sleep, society starts to fall apart pretty quickly.
Several characters appear to spout exposition on how bad it is to not sleep; apparently
it’s causing society to fall into anarchy pretty quickly.
I would’ve thought that’d be more to do with the total crashing of all electronic
devices, but apparently not.
Jill goes back to the university, where it turns out her employer, Murphy- a very low
energy Jennifer Jason Leigh- is actually a psychiatrist specialising in sleep, which
seems like a very convenient thing for the film.
She reiterates that not sleeping is bad; apparently it’ll make your organs fail and blood gush
out of your eyes.
I don’t actually think that’s true, but why not eh?
Murphy heads off to a military research base nearby and Jill is encouraged to come along;
unfortunately, her kid has gotten taken to a culty church, led by Pastor Barry Pepper,
the guy from Battlefield Earth.
And to prepare you for the worst, this is as exciting as the film gets, as the rest
of the runtime is filled with Jill slowly road-tripping to the hub.
Yawn indeed.
From the off, it’s clear that director Mark Raso is interested in focusing on the dramatic
stakes of this concept rather than the gosh-wow aspects of it; unfortunately that means you
get very little sense of just how big the problem is, an issue compounded by the obviously
stretched and very small budget for the movie.
I can see what he was going for: a sort of boiled-frog feeling, like everything is slowly
getting worse, and before you realise it, society’s over.
But that’s not really how it comes across.
It comes across as boring, with long stretches of inaction punctuated by implausible setpieces
and expository dialogue where characters recite the screenwriters’ research about how important
sleep is.
Instead of a high-stakes drama with sci-fi trappings, you end up with a glacially-paced,
under-explored apocalyptic road trip.
Oh, and one more thing.
As the story wears on, the characters become more and more irrational, because they haven’t
been able to sleep, and as you might know by now, not being able to sleep makes you
crazy.
I think this is a pretty good idea on the surface of it; it allows Raso to ratchet up
the tension, with everyone becoming paranoid and unreliable.
But the direction is literally that everyone act more sleepy.
So instead of adding tension, with all these unstable people running around, everyone just
speaks slower and has a face like they’ve just poured orange juice into their cornflakes.
Not exactly thrilling stuff, and not helped by Raso’s contemporary drama approach to
pacing, which slows down these scenes even further, occasionally pushing them into pretty
comic territory.