IO--a love story between a young woman and the planet she calls home

I watched the sci-fi film IO on Netflix last night. It is the story of Earth's demise, through the eyes of a young woman, Sam, who has only known an Earth that is headed for destruction. She was born into a world that was dying--animals, birds, humans. Global warming led to changes in the earth's atmosphere that could not sustain life any longer. The only places where there still remained enough pockets of oxygen were in mountainous areas, and that is where her scientist father moved her and her mother. He wanted to find a way to save the Earth; most other surviving humans have made the long trek to Io, one of Jupiter's moons, which apparently can support life. Sam is one of the few remaining humans on Earth, and she spends her days carrying on her father's work, looking for evidence of life/new life down in the Zone (the city), which is completely barren and devoid of all life. She drives an ATV and always has a supply of oxygen with her. On the top of the mountain where she lives, she tends to living plants that she has managed to grow in a greenhouse, a surprising development. She also has a huge telescope so that she can look at the night sky and at Io, where her engineer boyfriend Elon lives. They carry on a long-distance relationship characterized mostly by loneliness. And then one day Micah comes into her life, arriving in a hot-air balloon. He has come to visit her father after his wife died; both of them listened to her father's advice to stay on Earth rather than leave for Io, while he researched ways of making humans and animals able to adapt to the new atmosphere. That decision proved fatal for his wife. Sam tells him that her father has taken a trip to another part of the mountains on a research mission and that he is due home in a few days. Micah accepts this at first, but after several days, he begins to understand that things are not what they seem. He finds out that Sam's father is dead, as is her mother, and that she is living there alone. He decides to take her with him in the balloon to the site of the last shuttle launch that is leaving for Io. He doesn't want to leave her on Earth alone. Sam seems determined to join him, especially after they both become romantically involved, and after she finds out that Elon is leaving on a ten-year mission to Proxima Centauri. She understands that she and Elon will never be together, and that pushes her toward Micah. But things are not what they seem.

I won't give away the ending to the film, but I found it to be moving. It touched me that a young woman who had never known an Earth that was healthy, was so determined to restore it to its previous beauty, to help it to survive. It touched me that she did not want to give up on this planet, that she believed (foolishly perhaps) that it could be saved. The ending is ambiguous; one is unsure if it is a dream or reality. I chose to believe that it was reality.

The film has gotten mostly negative reviews in the media, on Imdb and elsewhere. I will admit that it might have benefited from tighter editing as it dragged in some places. And the science part of it was full of holes and mistakes. But I was drawn in by the story, and that is what makes a film work for me. If it touches my heart, then it works for me. It was not a sappy film, nor was it an upbeat one. It was simply a film that describes our perhaps not-so-distant future. Make of that what you will. If global warming brings about an end to our way of life on this planet, there will be people who will want to stay on Earth to try to save it, and those who will leave it behind. It is not always so easy to know what one would do and that is what the film tries to portray. I think it managed to do that despite its flaws. If you are looking for Alien, I am Legend, or Interstellar, this is not any of those films (it couldn't be anyway because it is very low-budget). Monsters are not waiting in the dark places to attack, and there is no impressive interplanetary space travel or talk of tesseracts. However, like Interstellar, it touched me because at heart, it is really a love story. In Io's case, it is a love story between a young woman and the planet she calls home.