Infini (2015)
“Whit!
Come back!
I was thinking of making you my new best friend!”
Infini is an Australian film about a search and rescue team that are teleported to an off-world mining facility to rescue Whit Carmichael (played by Daniel MacPherson) who is the lone survivor of a biological outbreak.
With a minimal amount of time spent on Whit’s backstory, pregnant wife and in a world with high unemployment so the usual, the film literally ‘jumps’ straight into it.
A team teleports back to earth from Infini in a rage putting the area into lockdown. Now this is a good scene. The people returning start at loggerheads with the crew on earth trying to go through the usual procedures to make sure they haven’t brought anything dangerous back with them and they aren’t suffering from ‘data corruption’ in which their bodies cells become infected or infused with something.
This isn’t your Star Trek teleporting. In Infini teleporting is a dangerous affair carrying a high death rate.
Things turn sour quickly so the site is placed on lockdown leading to a lethal gas being released giving us lots of shouting in an energetic yet tense scene.
Problem is we’ve seen good openings before only for the film to become a mess.
So to save himself from being trapped in this lockdown Whit illegally slipstreams to Infini.
Another search and rescue team is sent to rescue Whit and to stop a payload from being teleported to earth by someone infected with the same rage inducing bacterial agent as the team that caused the lockdown.
Upon arrival they find Whit who has been hiding and tells them that the people on here killed themselves because of the infections.
Well tore each other to shreds.
Cue the usual scepticism and accusations of cowardliness that films of this sort inevitably have before they begin to accept the truth.
And they accept it pretty quick given how this film takes no time in killing of enough of the team in very bloody ways.
Whit has to form an uneasy alliance with Chester (played by Luke Ford) a person that almost doesn’t need to be infected to act deranged.
Again this is the usual we have come to expect from from films of this type but Luke is as much fun to watch as he descends into madness as is any time his character and Whit are on screen together that culminates in a rage fulled fight.
Infini has a very nice old 80’s claustrophobic space station look and feel to it. The filming location is perfect and made better with all the blood and body parts strewn everywhere.
Keeping things simple plot wise the story does get a bit existential near the end and the opening is known to be a bit confusing with an ending that is left for you to decide what happens after the credits start.
There isn’t anything outstanding but there is enough done very well for a fan of old trapped on a space station fans like myself to be very pleasantly surprised and entertained.
Infini certainly has a look of a film with a far bigger budget.
Loud, violent, claustrophobic and tense I was so entertained I thought the runtime was closer to 90 minutes and not 2 hours .
Thumbs up from me.
