Infini

Aussie director Shane Abbess seeks to emulate the classic sci-fi movie Aliens with his debut. Although it does work as a good horror film, some poor writing and direction has made it slightly disappointing, despite being quite an ambitious film.

In the 23rd century, an impoverished population of Earth earn money by taking part in off world mining that they travel to via a process called Slipstreaming (time travel mixed with teleportation, it's a bit unclear). Whit Carmichael (Daniel MacPherson) is on the first day of this job, but after a crisis at the home base, he is transported to the furthest outpost in the galaxy. A search and rescue team is dispatched to bring him home. Only once they get there, the team discovers that there is an airborne virus that turns the crew against one another.

As previously stated this film is very similar to Aliens at the base level. But where this film suffers is that there is too much exposition happening throughout the entire thing, followed by patches where you are unsure of what is going on. Within the first twenty minutes we are exposed to a lot of sci-fi technology that we need to understand for later in the movie, but we don't get a clear enough explanation of how exactly they work. The movie also tries to make way too many explanations about what the virus is (spoiler: it's an alien lifeform!) and how it spreads, but instead we could have just been told that it is turns you into a space zombie, that I could have taken on board and not have been so confused about. Without going into it too much, the ending is also very confusing. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be an allegory for something because what is there seems like a bit of a cop out.

The characters are largely unsympathetic as we don't get enough time to see any development from any of them. All we know about Whit is that he has a pregnant wife and he must get back to her, as is the case with crew member Harris Menzies (Harry Pavlidis), he has a daughter. I think there was a relationship between two of the crew members, but it was so intermittent that I couldn't tell for sure. The rest of the crew isn't at all expanded on, despite that Chester Huntington (Luke Ford) is one of three characters who share in the majority of screen time. Also there is a character called Rex Mannings! (Go watch Empire Records to discover why Rex Manning Day is so important).

Despite the fact that these characters are all severely underdeveloped, the main performances are top notch. Daniel MacPherson does show an incredible amount of fear and does share a fantastic scene with Luke Ford where I am pretty sure they shared a joint beforehand. Ford is channeling Adam Baldwin in Firefly, but still makes the character his own. Harry Pavlidis gives the only endearing performance. I'm surprised that Grace Huang and Luke Hemsworth (older brother of Chris and Luke) got such high credit in the film because they are barely in it.

The film has done one thing well though. For a movie with a low budget, Abbess has made a great looking film. The shots are all expertly done and the CGI backgrounds are impressive considering most budget sci-fi flicks look pretty poor. Also Brian Cachia's score is impressive and it does give the film a sound that wouldn't be out of place in a big Hollywood blockbuster.

This debut from Aussie writer/director Abbess aims a little high to differentiate itself from other legends in the genre of sci-fi horror, but it feels a little ambitious for a first feature film. Despite settling into it's rhythm in the second act, the over the top science fiction elements and poor writing take away any enjoyment of the film.