Movie Reviews

Air
submitted by
Thomas
 on
Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - 13:45
4.0
Directed by: 

Air plays out in a world where pretty much everyone has died after weapons of mass destruction have bombed our planet to shit and where air has become nonexistent. Only a couple of couple were handpicked by the government to reestablish society and they are kept in sleeping pods in underground bomb shelters.

Engineers Bauer (The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus) and Cartwright (Blood Diamond’s Djimon Hounsou) get to wake up every now and then for two hours (that’s when the air runs out) to perform maintenance. While Bauer uses some of that time to masturbate, Cartwright prefers to have imaginary chats with his girlfriend (who turns out to be one of the few survivors kept in a state of suspended animation). When one of their pods malfunctions, they have to go outside to retrieve replacement parts. With the oxygen running out, the two of them clash over what to do next and this leads to a deadly cat-and-mouse game.

I’m guessing writer-director Christian Cantamessa and co-writer Christ Pasetto were aiming for something along the lines of “Sunshine” or “The Divide”. But instead they end up with a movie where an idea is introduced and then thrown right out the window. Well, not literally because they are after all, in a windowless bunker. Maybe this would have been a better movie if they ran with one idea instead of heaping one on top of the other. But we’ll never know. In any case, my interest had dwindled long before the main characters’ air supply.