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By Doug Norrie | Published
Let’s be honest: science fiction is difficult to achieve with a budget. You have great ideas, complicated emotions and, usually, there is not enough money to build something more great than a flashing hall. But from time to time, a movie like Orbitter 9 He comes and reminds him that science fiction does not need lasers or explosions to get under his skin, he only needs a strong hook, a human nucleus and actors that do not flash by saying “life support failure.”
Directed by the first half Hatem Khraiche and launched in 2017, Orbitter 9 It is a Spanish-Colombian film that begins intimate, calm and full of promises. It focuses on a young woman named Helena, interpreted with a true emotional severity of Clara Lago, who seems to be alone on a mission in deep space. Then someone unexpected appears. And then the movie begins to change. Because Orbitter 9 It works better when you don’t know where you are going. The configuration is tight, the tension accumulates slowly, and when it finally makes its movement, it is obtained.
The sets are minimal but effective, and the sound design has its weight. The world has a great sterility that makes it feel off enough to keep guessing. And although it does not have the enamel of a larger science fiction rate, it does not need it. The emotional bets are in front and the center, and that is where the film wants to live.
Clara Lago carries the movie. It is in almost all scenes, and makes the internal conflict feel real without leaning too much in melodrama. Álex González offers solid support. Chemistry works, but the script does not always give them enough to work. It flirts with great ethical questions, then backed before things become too complicated. Orbitter 9 Gestes towards deep science fiction, but it is really a love story wrapped in a space suit.
Critically, the film landed somewhere in the middle. It has a 67% score in Rotten Tomatoes, not a knockout, but respectable. The public was less friendly, giving it a colder reception, with a Rotten Tomatoes audience score around 40% and an average IMDB of 5.9/10. He never broke internationally, but in Netflix, where he debuted worldwide, in silence he forged a audience of curious science fiction fans who were looking for something out of the Hollywood machine.
Orbitter 9 It is not perfect. Start strong, stumble a bit in the rear half and play things a bit too safe when I should make the leap. But he is also trying something attentive. It is science fiction as a piece of humor, romance as a mysterious box. And for that, it is worth your time, even if I don’t hit the landing.
You simply do not enter war units or space battles. This is quieter than that. It is the type of science fiction that you observe alone, at midnight, and you think for days.
