Science Fiction Volume One: The Osiris Child (2016)

There is a particular kind of science fiction film that arrives with a colon in its title and a trilogy in its heart, and The Osiris Child: Science Fiction Volume One is that film. Shane Abbess has assembled a dusty, serviceable chase picture across an off-world colony, complete with corporate military contractors, a dying child, and monsters that live inside us all, which the marketing insists is a metaphor. The Australian outback stands in for a hostile planet with reasonable economy. Kellan Lutz broods. Daniel MacPherson broods with slightly more parental urgency. Somewhere in the middle, a warden played by Temuera Morrison glowers at people, as is his contractual obligation.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is largely innocent. The cast is mostly white Australian, with a handful of minority performers drifting through roles that carry no commentary on identity whatsoever. Rachel Griffiths appears as a general, a stock military-command part that gestures toward female authority without ever stopping to discuss it. There are no LGBTQ+ characters, no racial themes, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent figures, and no climate allegory to speak of. The impending global crisis is a generic catastrophe, not a warning about emissions. The villainous Exor corporation offers a faint anti-corporate shading, though nobody pauses to deliver a lecture about shareholder value, so it never develops into an economic critique.

The film's greatest restraint is its refusal to sermonize. It wants to be a pulpy action piece, and it succeeds at being a pulpy action piece, which is a modest but honest achievement. Critics at the time found it delirious and overheated, and that seems fair. What we have here is a genre exercise that keeps its politics in the props department, where they belong. It will not change anyone's mind about anything, and it is not trying to. For that small mercy, we can be quietly grateful.