Awake (2021)

Netflix's Awake arrives with a premise that sounds like a dare: a solar flare strips humanity of sleep, and only an ex-Army medic and her possibly immune daughter can carry the cure across a collapsing landscape. Mark Raso directs with the grim efficiency of a man who has seen Children of Men and would like us to know it. Gina Rodriguez plays Jill, a recovering addict and mother, and she holds the center of the frame with a weary resolve the screenplay does not deserve. The film reached number one worldwide on the platform, which tells us something about algorithms and nothing about quality. Critics were unkind. They were correct.

There is a Latina lead here, and a supporting cast that mixes races without ceremony. No character remarks on it. No theme grows from it. The diversity simply exists, unremarked, which is either progress or indifference depending on the viewer's mood. Jill's gender matters only in that she is the one running. The film has no interest in what it means for a woman to carry this weight, and it never asks. Sleep deprivation arrives as a science fiction affliction, complete with hallucinations and neurological decay, and is never mistaken for a metaphor about the mind's varieties. The apocalypse is solar, not climatic. Nobody mentions carbon. Nobody mentions the wealthy, the poor, or the fragile structures that produced this world. Churchgoers attempt to sacrifice a child, which is the closest the film comes to a thesis, and the thread drops within minutes.

The remainder is a chase, a lab, some screaming soldiers, and a final act that drowns its protagonist in a lake to make a point about resurrection. The film is not preachy. It is not political. It is barely coherent, and it seems to know it. We are left with a strange artifact: a diverse cast performing a story with nothing to say about diversity, or about anything else. The ambition is cosmic. The reach is short. Somewhere a spreadsheet recorded a triumph.