By Doug Norrie
| Revealed
Let’s be sincere: science fiction is difficult to drag off on a price range. You’ve obtained massive concepts, sophisticated feelings, and often not sufficient cash to construct something cooler than a blinking hallway. However at times, a film like Orbiter 9 comes alongside and reminds you that sci-fi doesn’t want lasers or explosions to get below your pores and skin, it simply wants a powerful hook, a human core, and actors who don’t blink when saying “life assist failure.”
Directed by first-timer Hatem Khraiche and launched in 2017, Orbiter 9 is a Spanish-Colombian movie that begins out intimate, quiet, and filled with promise. It facilities on a younger girl named Helena, performed with actual emotional gravity by Clara Lago, who appears to be alone on a deep-space mission. Then somebody sudden exhibits up. After which the film begins to shift. As a result of Orbiter 9 works finest while you don’t know precisely the place it’s going. The setup is tight, the strain builds slowly, and when it lastly makes its transfer, it’s earned.
The units are minimal however efficient, and the sound design pulls its weight. The world has a cool sterility that makes it really feel simply off sufficient to maintain you guessing. And whereas it doesn’t have the polish of larger sci-fi fare, it doesn’t want it. The emotional stakes are entrance and middle, and that’s the place the movie needs to stay.
Clara Lago carries the film. She’s in practically each scene, and he or she makes the interior battle really feel actual with out ever leaning too arduous on melodrama. Álex González offers stable assist. The chemistry works, however the script doesn’t all the time give them sufficient to work with. It flirts with massive moral questions, then backs away earlier than issues get too messy. Orbiter 9 gestures towards deep sci-fi, but it surely’s actually a love story wrapped in an area go well with.
Critically, the movie landed someplace within the center. It has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, not a knockout, however respectable. Audiences have been much less variety, giving it a cooler reception, with a Rotten Tomatoes viewers rating round 40% and an IMDb common of 5.9/10. It by no means broke vast internationally, however on Netflix, the place it debuted globally, it quietly carved out an viewers of curious sci-fi followers on the lookout for one thing exterior the Hollywood machine.
Orbiter 9 isn’t excellent. It begins robust, stumbles a bit within the again half, and performs issues a bit too secure when it ought to take the leap. But it surely’s additionally attempting one thing considerate. It’s science fiction as a temper piece, romance as a thriller field. And for that, it’s value your time, even when it doesn’t stick the touchdown.
Simply don’t go in anticipating warp drives or house battles. This one’s quieter than that. It’s the form of sci-fi you watch alone, at midnight, and take into consideration for days.
