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teens today do not know how good they have it. Fifteen-year-old Ava is a
particularly obnoxious example. Even when a drug overdose causes her to relinquish
her body to a time-traveler, her remnant remains as petulant as ever. However,
the time-traveling rebel agent will appreciate the little things about our
world when she is not battling to prevent the apocalyptic dystopia of the
future in Nicole Jones-Dion’s Stasis (trailer here), which releases
today on VOD services.
Forget
Skynet. The Cabal nuked over the world and now oppresses the cinders. It is not
practical for the resistance to operate in this environment, but the past is a
different matter. The world is quite messy in 2017, but in a good way. Who
would really notice a handful of standoffish people? Their method of time
travel necessarily helps them blend in. Basically, when a dying spirit exits,
the time traveler moves into the empty “skin,” while their "up-time" body goes into "stasis."
The
only hitch is the randomness of the process. Obviously, it is less than ideal
when Seattle moves into Ava after she OD’s at a party and Lancer, her partner
in romance and covert operations assumes control of a twenty-ish college
student after a hazing incident. However, Ava might not have fully died.
Although nobody can see her, she haunts Seattle and Lancer like a ghost.
It
takes an awfully long time for the film to get to this point, like fortysome
minutes. Still, the mixture of science fiction and woo-woo elements is a fresh
wrinkle. Unfortunately, Stasis can
never get out of the long shadow cast by the Terminator franchise, especially when the Cabal sends back a “Hunter”
to track Seattle and Lancer.
Not
to belabor the point, but there are some awkward performances in Stasis. On the plus side, Richard
Lippert stands out again in a B-movie for his commanding presence, this time
playing the rebels’ “down-time” commander, Captain Suthers. Based on his work
in Stasis and The Covenant, he could become something like the next Michael
Ironside. The others you might say are more hit-and-miss.
