In 1968 Stanley Kubrick scrubbed spaceships white and gleaming with hisSpace Odyssey, and then in 1979 Ridley Scott mucked them up again with Alien. Every science-fiction movie since looks like one or the other: the spaceships either glow like Apple stores or stink like dive bars.Debug, I think, aspires to split the difference — to scuff up the MacBooks and spill a beer on the Fetzer maple desks. Its setting is a hulking interstellar cargo ship in the Nostromo mould, decommissioned under vaguely mysterious circumstances and left adrift, creaking and spooky, in some remote corner of space. But this is no mere freighter. Inside it’s more like a luxury cruise: a pristine star-liner equipped with sensory baths and drug-feeding pharmaceutical suites. What sort of cargo workers are assigned to this ship? Billionaire hobbyists? Cosmic aristocrats?
There isn’t a good narrative reason for all this intergalactic opulence. But there’s a very good dramatic one. Sensory baths, pharmaceutical suites: these are interesting places to have people violently and extravagantly killed. A junkie looking for a discreet fix might sneak his forearm into an automated drug dispenser’s snug plastic tube, you see, only to find an intimidatingly oversized needle poised to poke and stab. Or a young ingenue, coaxed half-nude into a bath’s computer-augmented caress, might find a rather more intense sensory experience than anticipated. And so on. Debug’s design principle, it turns out, is the same one that governs jammed slasher doorknobs and rickety elevators in ghost-movie hotels — the accoutrements that furnish a reliably grisly death. You half-expect Vincent Price to pop up and offer a million dollars to anyone who can survive the night.
So it’s a haunted house picture set in space. That was almost a bona fide genre, for a few years in the late ’90s: it reached an apotheosis of sorts with Paul W.S. Anderson’s agreeably lurid Event Horizon, from 1997, and collapsed into a black hole of obsolescence in 2001, when Jason X launched the knife-wielding Voorhees mute (and, in a legendary cameo, David Cronenberg) into the stars. Since then the style has been relegated mainly to video games, like the Dead Space series or last year’s Alien Isolation. But in the movies we haven’t seen it in awhile. This sort of space-horror tends to draw, naturally, from 2001 and Alien: from the former comes some kind of nefarious artificial intelligence with a penchant for lock-outs and system overrides, while from the latter comes a crew of disposable victims to be dispatched, often gruesomely, one at a time.
The crew, in this case, are criminals: “cyber” criminals, in movie parlance — the lot of them apparently from the Chris Hemsworth school of hackers who could moonlight as underwear models. They’ve been assigned to put some work in on this eerie abandoned vessel as part of their long-term sentence, and it isn’t long, as you might expect, before the makeshift team becomes malevolent AI fodder. The AI is played by former Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa, usually found shimmering into ghostly view across the ship’s various computer screens, glowering at our heroes like a pale-blue Max Headroom. Actually Momoa is quite good here, despite the ludicrous surroundings. The trouble is the inanity he’s forced to work with. Intimidating a half-dozen teenagers isn’t especially dignified work, true. But when your character’s name is “Iam” — pronounced, you know, “I am” — even your most tasteful work begins to seem like overacting.
Meanwhile Kaida (Jeananne Goossen), our lead hacker, spends a lot of time running around in peril, taunting Iam as her fellow inmates are led unceremoniously to slaughter. Goossen, almost obscenely attractive, is a compelling enough star; her dilemma, meanwhile, is strictly horror by rote, and it’s difficult to remain interested.Debug is directed by David Hewlett, an actor recognizable, to science-fiction fans of a certain age, as one of the stars of Cube, Canada’s most enduring contribution to the genre. So the comparison is inevitable. Cube was a silly film too, in a lot of ways, but it was also skillfully made and, as a work of very limited resources, rather ingenious. What’s more, it was serious-minded — not so much Star Wars as Samuel Beckett. Now it seems plain enough that with Debug David Hewlett’s ambitions are notably lower: this is Grand Guignol rather than Godot. But what’s missing here is the wit that madeCube so appealingly playful.
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