Awake
NetflixParalysis in the face of exhaustion is a thread many artists and creatives have followed. It has never taken them anywhere graceful or engaging. Never in the past forty years, anyway, and Awake certainly will not change that. It is no Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that is for sure. Instead, it depicts a tale that definitely isn’t a plot transplant of Day 5, a Rooster Teeth drama series. No, that would be madness. Awake instead depicts characters who cannot fall asleep and all the electronics of the world have been wiped out. So, Day 5 and a bit of Cell, the Stephen King book, thrown in there for good measure.
It would be a fine rip-off of those flimsy; aforementioned projects should Awake have anything to say. Predictably, and rather glumly, it does not. Wouldn’t it be scary if we could never sleep? That’s as close as we get to poetic justifications for the horrors found in this Gina Rodriguez-led world. A step down for Mark Raso after the touching work delivered in Kodachrome, his horror chops are not quite as steady as they should be. Dark and mysterious pasts, cures that are conveniently in arms reach of the character, everything about Awake plays like a convenient, coincidental collection of connect-the-dots plot points. You do not need to hear the dialogue or see these characters' reactions to know that not everything is as it seems, that they will conquer over evil in the dying moments, and that they are all troubled by lives they led before the apocalypse.
Such broad and incredulous topics should not be so humdrum, though. Awake struggles to separate itself from the biggest sleep-deprived horrors in the business, not just because it has nothing to say but because its characters are not interesting. They play out like stereotypes because they are. Fractured remains of the writing room lay scattered across the electronic-less landscape presented. This is a chance for Gregory Poirier, Mark Raso, and Joseph Raso to flex their narrative skills and provide audiences with an opportunity to realise they have the desirable storytelling techniques necessary in the modern era. They do not, by the looks of it, possess such qualities. Not within Awake, which shuffles through its deck of miserable cliché and subsequently drops them all over the floor. An utter mess at the best of times, the embarrassment of its simplistic story being too much for them is the real horror to be found within.
Awake? You won’t be by the end of this shoddy horror drag. Still, it captures that typical American attitude. The first sign of anything supernatural and it has to be China causing problems once again. But as Rodriguez wanders the halls of a flagging hospital, and coma patients rise, it is a struggle and a half to take Awake seriously. Only one day into the apocalypse and a church tries to sacrifice the MacGuffin device character. Raso and company have no clue about sleep deprivation, that much is for sure. There is no gradual build. People just snap. They have confused rabies with an inability to relax. Fair enough, it does make for a delightfully demented time, just one that we’re laughing at, not with.