Instead of boldly going where no one has gone before, Helena is little more than a lab rat running in a wheel, submitting to tests and analysis from an all-seeing eye. ( Warning: Mild spoilers follow.) Khraiche's camera follows Alex on his way out of Orbiter 9 and he's shown walking through a dark passageway, into an elevator, and finally out into the middle of a forest. NetflixĪn explanation for Alex's behavior arrives about 20 minutes into the movie, but it's enough of a fun surprise - and it's handled in a clever way - that you might want to go in cold to the movie. 'I'm sorry about what happened last night,' he cruelly tells Helena, and then he leaves in his space-pod. ( Orbiter 9 wisely skips the clichéd zero-gravity sex scene.) In the morning, he wakes up and finishes his work before readying to leave. The two kiss and things quickly escalate from there. When he asks what she's doing, she responds with 'Looking at you.' Soon, she's telling him she's never kissed anyone. Possibly aware that it could be decades before a repairman this attractive ever drops by her ship again, Helena climbs on top of him while he sleeps. In space, no one can hear you thirst.Īlex skips the dinner, like a jerk. He fixes a malfunction on the ship and Helena invites him to dinner he turns her down she's basically like, I've been in space by myself for my whole life and have only ever hung out with my parents, please eat dinner with me, dude.

Alex shows up with a little robotic partner, a bag of tools, and smoldering eyes. He arrives in his own little space-pod, which attaches to Helena's and causes her ship's AI to call out 'coupling initiated,' a phrase that calls to mind the sexualized rocket-ship ballet of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (We learn this exposition in one of the movie's many inelegant info-dumps.) Clearly, dating isn't exactly at the front of her mind.Įnter Alex, a hunky space-repairman brought to muscle-bound life by Álex González of X-Men: First Class. She's lived on the ship her whole life, and her parents were once aboard as well but were forced to sacrifice themselves to preserve oxygen on the vessel and get Helena to the promised land. Escaping a hellacious home planet to colonize a new world by herself, Helena is lonely, isolated, and fills her day with more cardio than a Soul Cycle disciple. The movie opens with Helena, an astronaut played by Clara Lago, strenuously working out and closely monitoring her health aboard the Orbiter 9, a spacecraft on its way to a distant planet called Celeste. It may not shock you, but it isn't going to actively irritate you either - and that's an improvement over several recent Netflix sci-fi misfires like The Titan or The Cloverfield Paradox.

Orbiter 9 is a bit more upfront about the deception at the root of its story and it also delivers its twists with a touch of naturalistic restraint. Putting the furry analysts aside for a second, writer and director Hatem Khraiche, making his feature debut, has created a movie that often plays like a more grounded, less sinister tale of survival than the aforementioned Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence blockbuster, which faced warranted criticism for its often mangled handling of a creepy premise. Only, in this case, with a wolf therapist. Unless you keep a watchful eye on your Netflix home page, you may have missed this Spanish space station drama, which plays in the same thematic solar system as 2016's interstellar romance Passengers. At least, that's one of the more outlandish ideas raised by Orbiter 9, Netflix's latest sci-fi original movie to arrive on the platform with all the promotional fanfare typically reserved for secret corporate experiments or well-executed government cover-ups. In the near future, therapists will be replaced with soothing, perplexed images of digital wolves that nod along as you describe your problems.