IO

Like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner, IO (pronounced “I-oh”) predicts a grim future for earthlings, this time due to the destruction of the planet’s natural resources, like clean air and water. The movie never explicitly outlines whether it was fossil fuels or other causes that made Earth uninhabitable, but when we meet 20-ish Sam (Margaret Qualley), she knows nothing of the way the Earth used to be, so clearly problems have been going on for quite a while. Her father, Dr. Walden (Danny Huston), was a scientist and advocate for staying on Earth to nurture it back to health, and their experiments together with beehives are at the heart of their reclamation efforts. But all has not been well in their isolated scientific enclave, and when a stranger drops out of the sky (in a helium balloon) to bring Sam and her dad to the last launch leaving Earth for the colony on Io, a moon of Jupiter, Sam must decide if she wants to make the journey and leave behind the desolate planet she and her father worked to revive.