Available on YouTube Premium
What a difference a year makes. This time in 2017, I started reviewing some of the new scripted dramas that YouTube Red was putting out. It was slightly promising yet ultimately B-movie, also-ran material such as Lifeline and Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television*, rather than anything that would inspire you to stump up a subscription fee each month to watch it.
Since then, however, YouTube Red has rebranded as YouTube Premium, become available in the UK, and has gone on to produce Netflix-worthy fare such as Impulse and Cobra Kai. Now just a year later, we have Origin, which makes Lifeline look like someone tried to make a TV series with a Box Brownie and whatever they had in a jam jar on the mantlepiece.
Origin
Directed by Paul WS Anderson (Resident Evil, Event Horizon, Alien vs Predator) on a budget the size of a small third world country’s GDP, Origin is a star-filled sci-fi/horror extravaganza that, unfortunately, is total bobbins. It sees a bunch of largely British (Harry Potter‘s Tom Felton and Natalia Tena, Fraser James, Adelayo Adedayo, Nina Wadia) and European (Nora Arnezeder, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) actors, with varying degrees of American accent, get stuck in a hodgepodge of sci-fi and horror movies, struggling to survive.
Initially, they’re in Passengers, since they’re on a spaceship, the Origin, travelling to a far-off colony to start new lives, but wake up a tad early. Why have they woken up? Where is everyone else? Are they close enough to their destination that they won’t die of old age before they get there?
However, then they’re in Event Horizon and Alien as they discover that everyone has already left the ship because something has got on board it, leaving them behind with it. It doesn’t seem to be an it, so much as infection, however, since anyone who comes into contact with it starts to go a bit weird from the inside out.
What is it, will they survive and will we care?
