Awakening

A soldier, Grimes (Gravez), wakes up in a mine shaft after a blast or a quake or a cave-in of some kind and finds that the rest of his team are dead. The intro sequence has already told us that survivors are not always the strongest or the smartest, but more often than not the luckiest, so we have to assume that Grimes is one of the lucky ones. After coughing his guts up, stumbling around for a while and checking on the rest of his team, Grimes finally heads down the tunnel and gets comms chatter from the Doc (Khatib), who he is very happy to hear from. But there are things other than what he knows which are also in the mine shaft with him.

After moving a little way down the tunnel, Grimes comes across a character who is no longer what he once was. The guy has deep, black inky eyes, blood coming from his mouth, and dark black veins branching out all across his skin. He comes for Grimes in the expected lumbering way until he is shot and put to the ground, where Grimes also lands and pops a load of fungal spores into the air, which he ingests. Cue some quick shots of blood cells and colourful graphics to suggest that our hero is now also infected and will inevitably turn into one of those things he just killed – which are, of course, if you haven’t guessed it yet, yes, that’s right – they’re zombies.

There’s no need for head shots here though, as these zombies will go down with a few rounds to the gut, and that’s not the only thing which doesn’t track properly in student writer/director Alex Culberson’s new short film, Awakening. Despite the synopsis mentioning an asteroid mining facility, there is nothing within the main body of the film to suggest that what we are seeing is out in the depths of space. We get no explanation as to the ‘quake’ which occurred just before we join the story and there’s certainly no explanation as to what Grimes’ wife (Kiener) and child (Scanlon) also seem to be doing there. Everything is garbled in quick, minimal dialogue, with one line to suggest that Grimes ‘needs off this rock’ and one that there may or may not be a ‘ship’ on standby. Other than that, this story could take place in Cornwall for all we know.

The plotting seems to dive around thick and fast, with Doc coming in and out real quick before Grimes’ wife pops up on comms, then in the mine, and then somehow even Grimes’ child entering the story at the end. Nothing ever really gets explained properly and while there is undoubtedly betrayal and subterfuge going on behind the scenes, Culberson is never able to make any of this clear with his dialogue or plotting. In fact, we just have to rely on our own sci-fi references and knowledge – mostly of the Alien franchise but of other things, too – to see what’s going on and figure out what Culberson probably means. The fact that he’s lifted the main character name straight from zombie phenomenon The Walking Dead also shows the level of originality we are getting in this short film.

Awakening does, however, have a decent look to it, with director of photography Luke Park making the best use of spot lighting to fill his frames and keep the shadows in the background. The sound design is also pretty good, with all the audio linking in with the scenes naturally to offer some pretty tense atmosphere. The costumes and effects deserve praise, too, with everything giving off the feel of a bigger budget project and the attention to detail allowing the audience to feel somewhat pulled into the scenario. It’s just a shame that the audience still doesn’t really know where they are or know about anything that’s going on beyond the scope of the camera.

While Awakening is actually pretty well made, it suffers irredeemably from bad plotting and dialogue and a confused manner in which it tries to tell its story. There’s just too much that’s been borrowed from somewhere else and nothing new to see in what is essentially a boring film about a guy in a tunnel. Awakening, ironically, doesn’t see how its unoriginality permeates through almost every scene and would do a lot better if it opened its eyes a little to try something new. It’s only one step from space zombies to space zombie Nazis and that is a road that nobody wants to go down – anymore.