Those lower-tier originals provide a glimpse of what people click on when there’s nothing they might actively choose to watch: the meandering true-crime docuseries, the array of increasingly threadbare reality competition shows, the slapdash teen comedies, the high-concept, tight-focus sci-fi films — and man, are there a lot of the latter.
These movies are all over the place in terms of quality and budget, but there is something to the regularity with which they are offered up, and their recurring elements, that becomes haunting.
Fortunately for her, the cryo unit comes equipped with some shaky Wi-Fi equivalent and an AI companion who is able to offer help when she asks but who is also inconveniently inclined to sedate and/or euthanize the “bioform” it has been entrusted with.
Oxygen is not, however, a very thoughtful film, and what should be enormous revelations are moved past easily, Christie LeBlanc’s script operating with the briskness of a project more focused on being a riff on Buried than giving any peripheral sense of a coherent future world.
Then it is on to the next streaming sci-fi B-movie, whatever it may be — the lid, or the helmet, or the protective gear popped open and left behind for someone else to put on.