Like a lot of low budget films, some sci-fi draws on the past for inspiration. Infini, written and directed by Shane Abbess, is no exception, with its nods to Event Horizon and Alien amongst others.
In the early 23rd century, poverty is rife and people take dangerous jobs to survive. Walt Carmichael’ (Daniel MacPherson) is one of those who takes a military job working with a technology called ‘slipstreaming’, whereby people can be converted to data and transmitted long distances. When a biological outbreak occurs on Earth’s most distant mining colony, a Search and Rescue team is sent to secure it. This team returns in a violent state and the whole base is put into lockdown. ‘Walt’ escapes this lockdown using an illegal transmitter and slipstreams to the mining colony. Once there, ‘Walt’ discovers carnage and the beginning of his journey, as things are not quite what they seem.
My first thought was, why is it always a mining colony? This trope has become almost like a rite of passage for sci-fi, which needs to make an appearance in a film to prove it’s sci-fi. Just once, I’d like to see a film visit an unusual location for this kind of plot, so out goes the Penal Colony idea too! I will admit that it can sometimes work, and there is a reason these things become well used, but I did groan when I heard the words ‘mining colony’.
That aside, the world that writers Shane Abbess and Brian Cachia have created is an interesting one, with 95% of the population living below the poverty line and with controversial technologies at play. This opens up a whole wealth of possibilities for storytelling. Unfortunately, in this case, those opportunities mostly go begging, with the aspects of the setup merely being a backdrop for a relatively standard military search mission story. To my mind it would have been more interesting to set the story on Earth and have some part of it reference the poverty within the framework of a biological breakout. While this may, on the face of it, remove the need for ‘slipstreaming’, etc., this could still be used for rapid-response etc., so isn’t an insurmountable story issue.
Despite the weaknesses in the plot, the film does have a good atmosphere with some great visuals, which deliver a gritty and realistic world. The set design and cinematography are well done, both in the Earth environments and in the darker, more Alien franchise style sections, and it is a shame that they were not given more scope to explore that world.
The actors generally make a good thing out of the piece, with Daniel MacPherson being a solid lead. There are some weaknesses that the cast have to deal with, where dialogue has too much exposition or their characters are too generic to breathe life into properly, but on the whole, they do what they can with the script. As an aside, there were a couple of minor characters/extras that I was more interested in at the beginning, as they seemed to have something intriguing going on. Unfortunately, they were dispatched quite quickly!
Really, this film seems like a re-tread of many better films before it, and in some regards, a missed opportunity to explore some interesting social and technological themes. It has been shot well and does a pretty good job of entertaining you for 1 hr 45m, but, overall, its good looks and style don’t make up for the simple story.
