Anthony Mackie, playing a man named Micah, arrives on a hot air balloon about 25 minutes into the film. He wants to meet her famous scientist father (Danny Huston), whose voice we hear whenever she plays his tapes as a type of soothing mechanism, or protocol. Feeling less like his own mysterious being than a screenwriting tool, Micah helps hammer home what Sam’s father told her—“Don’t underestimate the power of human connection"—and talks whimsically about the time of "Before." Nonetheless, his arrival comes with suspicious timing: the last Exodus shuttle off of Earth is leaving within a few days, and soon enough he shares that he wants to take her on his balloon with him to the shuttle launch site, at any cost. But she doesn't tell him the truth about her father and he doesn't tell her why he actually is here.
In the passages that follow, “IO” does not grow a remotely compelling story out of the dry seriousness it started with. And as capable as the film’s duo might be, they cannot make their characters’ elusive backstories curious or their pensive gazes magnetic. Qualley and Mackie struggle to find chemistry as two slightly less lonely people in the world, conversing with monotone line-readings while guarding their private denials. They most of all help the movie supplant the notion of having its own interesting ideas by reciting the likes of Yeats, Eliot, and Plato.
However pure its intentions, “IO” is genre minimalism to a fault. It rhetorically asks questions like, “What if the only immediate narrative tension involved getting two people to a launch site?”, “What if these two characters always have secrets from each other?”, and more specifically, “What would it look like if a dystopian film was based on science, and had someone cryptically quoting Yeats through their oxygen mask?” Broad themes like staunch hope, and vital human connection, become cheap sentiments, vanishing into air. “IO” isn’t science fiction storytelling distilled so much as it is vaporized.
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