(WARNING: Spoilers for the movie "Oxygen" streaming on Netflix.)
A woman wakes up in a cryogenic pod with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The pod is running out of oxygen and she has to figure out how to either get help or escape on her own. The story unfolds as the viewer learns her identity at the same time that she does.
The idea that the future is so entirely bleak that the only hope for humanity is to send them to another planet is an old one. But to grow clone bodies loaded with digital copies of the consciousness of humans knowing that there’s no hope for themselves was a new one when I watched it.
I was thinking–along with the character–that she had been kidnapped and buried alive. I believed that she had been put in a medically-necessary cryogenic sleep and that her pod had been hijacked by dangerous people or maybe there had been some kind of natural disaster and the pod had been buried under a collapsed building.
Every single one of her ideas made sense. Her desperation was entirely present and real.
The shock of her first view outside of the pod was visceral.
The realization of who and what she was… and why she was in a cryogenic pod… it was powerful and memorable.
The idea that the Earth is so poisoned that humanity is on the brink of extinction. That the only way for humanity to survive is to create clones with digital memories and send them to a new world and a new chance at life… the sheer beauty and horror of looking out and seeing the damage that had been done to the ship.
Liv’s sheer refusal to lay down and die was admirable, as was her ability to work out where and when she was and what she would have to do to survive. That her tenacity resulted in her saving her own life made for a great ending to a great movie.
There are some that would see the ending of all life on Earth as an inevitability. "There is nothing to do and nothing that our religion will allow us to do. We must lay down our lives and accept the end of everything. It is the will of the cosmos."
The original Liv and her husband, despite knowing that they themselves were going to die, prevailed to save humanity and some form of themselves. They uploaded their consciousnesses, and while their bodies expired on a dying world, their clone-children were able to travel to another world and continue onward.
They died, yet they lived. They expired, but they did not fail in their attempt to survive.
The hope of humanity is not a prevalence of life… but a refusal to give up when there is any possibility for something more.
~Harper Kingsley
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