The Sci-Fi Thriller On Netflix That Will Keep You Up All Night
Imagine if the apocalypse came not with a blinding light and a mushroom cloud but something as innocuous as a blackout and a bad case of insomnia. That’s the premise behind 2021 sci-fi thriller Awake, an underrated movie that slipped by most people’s radar when it was originally released. Luckily, you can stream Awake right now on Netflix!
When a solar flare knocks out all of the electricity in the world, sleep seems like the best option—what could be a better use for eternal darkness—until everyone discovers the same incident eliminated everyone’s ability to sleep. Everyone except a young girl named Matilda (Barbie‘s Ariana Greenblatt).
Most movies about the apocalypse center on one of three things: aliens, zombies, or viruses/plagues. If a movie deals with the collapse of society, it’s almost always due to a variation of those three concepts. That’s what makes Awake such a fresh take on apocalyptic thrillers.
Now, a former army medic played by Jane the Virgin star, Gina Rodriquez, has to fight to keep Matilda out of the hands of desperate scientists while everyone around her starts to lose it, thanks to sleep deprivation.
Awake was directed for Netflix by Mark Raso, director of 2017’s Kodachrome. Raso wrote the screenplay himself, with his brother Joseph Raso. Joining Rodriguez and Greenblatt are Fast Times at Ridgemont High alum Jennifer Jason Leigh, Battlefield Earth‘s Barry Pepper, and Canadian actor Gil Bellows of Ally McBeal fame. The movie was filmed in 2019 and saw a straight-to-streaming release two years later, on June 9, 2021.
Reception for the movie was less than enthusiastic. Of the 51 critics on Rotten Tomatoes who bothered to review the movie, only 24 percent gave the movie anything close to a positive score.
Imagine having nothing to do while your mind slowly breaks down from lack of rest. The concept alone should be enough to send shivers down the back of Millenials and Gen Z’ers everywhere.
The audience was more forgiving, but only slightly with 27 percent of moviegoers giving Awake a thumbs up and the rest presenting it with a different digit altogether. The RT critics consensus called the Netflix movie “A scattered and shallow disaster flick, Awake will have audiences reaching for the snooze button.”
Despite the critical backlash against the movie, Awake did manage to become the #1 movie on Netflix worldwide when it was first released. But is there any reason to watch the film in 2023? The concept is interesting, and the performances elevate it above the standard B-movie fare.
Most movies about the apocalypse center on one of three things: aliens, zombies, or viruses/plagues. If a movie deals with the collapse of society, it’s almost always due to a variation of those three concepts. That’s what makes Awake such a fresh take on apocalyptic thrillers.
Awake shows that something as simple as losing power and not being able to fall asleep has the potential to bring the entire globe to its knees. In this day and age, it’s just instinct to scroll through your phone or veg out to Netflix when you can’t sleep.
What the movie lacks from a technical aspect, it more than makes up for with its original premise.
Imagine having nothing to do while your mind slowly breaks down from lack of rest. The concept alone should be enough to send shivers down the back of Millenials and Gen Z’ers everywhere.
Now add to that the fear that the government is going to kidnap your child and perform experiments on them because they can still sleep for some reason, and you can start to see how Awake‘s Nightmare scenario makes for a compelling Netflix watch.
Nobody is arguing that the movie’s execution is on par with Kubrick, but it’s also not Uwe Boll level’s of bad either. What the movie lacks from a technical aspect, it more than makes up for with its original premise.
Awake does a great job of playing with the paranoia that comes from end-of-the-world situations and how much worse that paranoia would be if no one could sleep. Often, we don’t realize just how much we need those 40 winks every night until we don’t get them, and the world of Awake is no different.
For all of its science fiction esthetics and the apocalyptic setting, Awake is really about a mother’s love for her children and what she is willing to do to protect them. Gina Rodriguez gives a convincing performance as Jill and Ariana Greenblatt, who started out on a Disney sitcom but is currently killing it in Barbie, is certainly no slouch in the acting department either.
Awake is, ironically, the perfect movie to put on when you can’t sleep, and you’re desperately searching Netflix for something to distract you from your exhaustion. If you like thought-provoking sci-fi concepts and have 90 or so minutes to kill, you could do a lot worse than Awake.
