Review: OXYGEN Flows Mostly Well, But Still Chokes Up
Making anything on a budget is difficult. When resources and time are against you, the final vision of a project can be in jeopardy. Oxygen, a French sci-fi film that just came out on Netflix, is clearly dealing with a smaller budget. But between smart usage of resources, editing, and one primary actress, the sci-fi film uses its money about as well as possible. While its ideas aren’t very original, its execution is still good enough to warrant a watch if you enjoy sci-fi and suspense.
Just from the name, it’s pretty easy to tell what the story will be about. No one‘s going to name their movie Oxygen and have it be about an abundance and an overflowing amount of fresh air. The movie starts very quickly and puts our main character in a dire situation. This urgency and desperation last throughout the whole movie but it’s still not exhaustive to watch. There are good lulls in tension that allow the audience to rest and take a breather before getting into the next tense scene.
One of the great things about the film was honestly the dubbing. I legitimately didn’t realize it was originally a French film until for the first few minutes of her speaking. Both the dub actress and the original actress do a fantastic job of selling the fear of being stuck and slowly suffocating. Melanie Laurent was basically the only face throughout the entire show, and she did a good job carrying the entire weight of the movie. While she wasn’t perfect and the dub doesn’t match every emotional beat of Laurent, it was still pretty impressive.
The biggest issue with the movie is the general plot. There were some strange motivations and odd reveals that were meant to be impactful but were often too confusing or too easily foreseen. The audience could connect a lot of dots and even fill in the blanks with a good imagination, but it felt more like homework than it does entertainment when the watcher needs to find reasons to justify parts of the movie. The producers did a good job allocating money in the right places so that big-budget shots could look good, but they were still a few times that the effects were definitely rushed.
Overall, Oxygen feels like a really good Syfy channel movie. Its production value and acting are definitely a step above the Syfy channel, but its premise and reveals were either too predictable or too complex to decipher. With an additional couple of months of refinement in writing, editing and effects, I think this movie could’ve been really great, but as of now it just stands as a good sci-fi thriller to watch on a random Tuesday night.
