Infini opens on a bunch of people we don’t know being yelled at. They are repeatedly being told that this is just standard procedure, and they should just comply with what is being asked of them. The scene has no context, and by the end, one is still left wondering what that was all about. It takes a while for the film to get to providing some detail to that scene, and even then, it still feels like something that was done for effect rather than for narrative purposes. That’s describes Infini as a whole, a film with big ideas that doesn’t really seem to know how to turn them into a coherent story.
It is the 23rd century. The first character introduced is Whit Carmichael (Daniel MacPherson). He has a pregnant wife who is wary of him taking a dangerous new job on an off-world site. Predictably, things go wrong on his first day, with an outbreak of some sort of alien contagion wreaking havoc at his place of work. He makes an unauthorized jump to an abandoned space station where the contagion may have started. The focus then shifts to the search-and-rescue sent out to find him and keep the contagion from reaching Earth.
The film introduces a lot of heady concepts. At the forefront is the idea of “slipstreaming,” a risky means of teleportation that involves time dilation and the possibility of data corruption. There is also the alien contagion itself, a sentient disease with vague intentions and metaphysical properties. And none of the film’s concepts are bad. They are all smart ideas that create all sorts of narrative possibilities. But this is particular movie doesn’t seem to be equipped to turn these ideas into a workable narrative.
It starts off confusing, with the aforementioned scene of yelling. And then it introduces the main character before quickly shifting focus to a whole other group of characters. And then there’s a bunch of talk about how to work the space station’s systems, before actually dealing with the main threat. And when that threat emerges, it’s largely kept abstract, the characters unable to really do anything to confront the contagion. It ends up becoming a game of cat-and-mouse where the cat is only a vague idea, the protagonists made to run through corridors with nothing really chasing them but the inevitability of death.
The movie does manage to look like a credible sci-fi feature. The environments are limited, but they get the flavor of the genre across. The film does seem to get a lot out of what must have been a pretty low budget. A couple of actors leave an impression. Daniel MacPherson is pretty strong in the lead role, conveying a sense of danger even when he’s basically left punching the air. Luke Ford plays the one character in the search-and-rescue team that’s given a personality, and he makes the most out of it. The rest feel a little interchangeable, though that’s more the fault of the script than anything else.
One can’t fault Infini for its ambition. Its hazy resolution does indicate that the filmmakers were aiming really high, their big, sci-fi concepts being herded towards a theme that tries to say something about humanity. But the film doesn’t earn it at all. The story is too rickety to support that big conclusion. The film is so caught in its ideas that it forgets to provide a plot. Or, it just isn’t imaginative enough to find another way of telling this story. It ends up emulating the greatest hits of the genre, but with none of the vitality behind them.
My Rating:
