In Space, No One Can Sue You for Copyright Infringement

'Ash' doesn’t have a single original frame in its 95-minute runtime.

Originality isn’t everything… but it is something. And Ash, the new film from director/composer Flying Lotus (né Levitating Tulip), doesn’t have a single original frame in its 95-minute runtime. Like 2023’s The Creator, Ash has little to offer beyond an endless parade of “borrowed” concepts and images, all of which achieve no greater good than to remind you of the superiority of its influences.

Ash opens with Ripley - er, Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) - awakening aboard a space station on an inhospitable alien planet with no memories and a cadre of corpses. Riya sets out to figure out what she’s doing here and why everyone with her seems to have been horrifically murdered when her sole surviving peer, Brion (Aaron Paul), returns from his orbiting the planet. It seems Riya, Brion, and the deceased were on a mission to find a new planet on which humanity could reside given the imminent uninhability of Earth; and Brion isn’t as concerned with figuring out how everyone else was killed as he escaping the planet before the space station runs out of oxygen.

Ridley Scott’s original Alien and its prequel, Prometheus, are the most obvious touchstones for Ash - there’s even a flashback sequence in which the crew share a jovial meal before meeting their imminent fate. But Ash also openly takes from John Carpenter’s The Thing, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (particularly the Abel Ferrara version), Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps, Christian Alvart’s Pandorum, the Dead Space video game franchise, Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars (which is, itself, a riff on 2001), James Gunn’s Slither (which is, itself, a riff on both Body Snatchers and Creeps), and Daniel Espinosa’s Life (which is, itself, a riff on Alien). Carpenter and the Kubrick estate might have the strongest legal case for intellectual property theft; Mr. Lotus has taken Carpenter’s creature design and the look of HAL 9000 almost verbatim. But all of those filmmakers and authors would have a right to feel like the producers of Ash own them a check.

The staggering lack of innovation might not feel like such a problem if Ash had, like, literally ANYTHING else to offer. Alas, no such luck. The movie was clearly made on a low budget, and Flying Lotus’ method for trying to cover that up is just to shoot most of the movie in close-up while bathing everything in red and blue light with the hopes that we won’t notice the lack of scope. And save for one pretty decent joke involving a machine that administers medical care, the tone is painfully po-faced; Zack Snyder might actually have a lighter touch than Lotus does.

Jonni Remmler’s screenplay, meanwhile, is sluggish, often nonsensical, and bogged down by a bizarre mix of over- and under-explaining the plot.

It’s also thin on character, and the cast, which also includes The Raid’s Iko Uwais and Beulah Koale from Next Goal Wins, suffers as a result. None of the supporting characters are one iota as memorable as the crew from Alien, and I honestly don’t know why Aaron Paul agreed to play Brion other than to either make sure he kept his SAG health insurance or because he lost a bet. Paul hasn’t exactly been drowning in memorable roles since Breaking Bad, but holy moly, is this character ever one-note and completely beneath him.

Then there’s Gonzalez. She’s in literally every single scene of the movie, and she simply cannot shoulder it. She keeps showing up in these macho action movies - Bloodshot, Ambulance, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, etc. - and in each of them, she stubbornly refuses to do any emoting whatsoever. A more charismatic performer might have made us care about Riya despite her complete lack of character traits, but Gonzalez’s stoicism leaves us with absolutely nothing onto which we can hold.

If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I say something nice about Ash, it would be that there are a handful of good gore effects, particularly involving melting and crushed faces. Maybe this movie will trigger dysmorphophobics. But for most people, it will just trigger a nap.