Io. Io. It’s Off to Work We Go.

If there’s anything I can’t stand it is a movie that is boring and a movie trying to pretend that it’s something more than what it is and IO does both.

It’s the future and the atmosphere has become toxic. Humanity has fled to Io, the volcanic moon of Jupiter so that they can harness the geothermal energy from the moon so that humanity can leave the solar system and find a new home somewhere else in the galaxy. This, of course, makes very little sense because there is geothermal energy… inside the Earth, but at least we get to see a really cool space station, right?

Haha… no. No we don’t. For IO takes place exclusively on Earth with two and only two characters. I feel like Deadpool here complaining that the studio couldn’t spring for another X-man. In this case, we have the daughter of a famous scientist trying to study species adaptation in insects in the hope that humanity can breathe the toxic atmosphere because… you know… that happens now apparently.

There’s also a guy in a balloon who comes to see the woman in the hopes of meeting her famous scientist father.

Ugh…. The action in this movie takes place primarily in one room between two characters and rarely does the drama reach levels I would consider interesting. The characters, for lack of a better word, are dull and awful. Margaret Qualley and Anthony Mackie almost seem as bored reciting these lines as I was listening to them.

The story, if you can call it that, is a mess. It’s a haphazard rigmarole of the liar revealed plot and a dozen other ethical tropes I’ve seen done before and done better all spoon-fed to you and explained as though it’s assumed that the audience is made up of complete imbeciles.

What’s more, the ending serves not only as a copout, but also as a way to completely negate the already dull plot between the two characters.

This movie is not just maddening, it’s maddingly maddening in its dullness. The seeds of a strong movie are there, but nothing sprouts. Not because the seeds aren’t viable, but because the gardener too ignorant to stop whizzing on the soil.