‘Aire, Just Breathe’ Review: Dystopian Sci-Fi Rooted in Fears of AI and Human Extinction Feels All Too Familiar

variety.com:

Manuel Betancourt In 2024, there is no shortage of possible imagined dystopian futures. Not just because there’s an ever-growing canon of films that dream up humanity’s worst-case scenarios but because news about climate disasters, headlines about dwindling natural resources and well-founded fears about the encroaching power of AI dominate our day-to-day lives.

That’s perhaps what makes Leticia Tonos’s “Aire, Just Breathe”both incredibly timely and decidedly familiar. The Dominican sci-fi film is an austere vision of a ravaged future that, while visually striking, remains much too hollow, cerebral, even, to fully pack an emotional punch.

The year is 2147 and Tania (Sophie Gaëlle) has learned to live on her own. Every day she wakes and cares for what scant plants she can nurture in the underground bunker she’s come to call home.

Despite not having had contact with any other humans in quite some time (she may be the sole survivor of what we’re told was the Great Chemical War which drove humanity to near-extinction), Tania is committed to trying to help life find a way.