When not striking a thoughtful pose, the script behaves like any other captive-woman drama does. Julia cowers, concocts daring escape attempts that invariably go awry, and eventually goes with the oldest trick in the book by turning Stockholm syndrome on her captor. Her blossoming relationship with the profoundly dim Tau leaves Alex to fill the villain role, which he does as flatly as possible. Skrein has none of the typical mad scientist’s kooky charisma or manic abandon, only the sadistic streak. The lone thing separating him from the nightly news’ usual predator is a big investor meeting mentioned no fewer than four times. Perhaps Alex created Tau in his own image: unaccountably dumb for a self-proclaimed genius.
Sci-fi has a reputation as the most conspicuously cerebral film genre, and Netflix appears to be on a mission to change that. Tau’s potent mixture of derivative 22nd-century production design with a visible lack of brain activity must play to whatever algorithm compelled the streaming giant to pick up Mute, The Cloverfield Paradox, Anon, Lucid Dream, The Titan, What Happened to Monday, and Orbiter 9. The middling-to-unforgivable sci-fi picture is Netflix’s calling card, saved from the straight-to-video bin by the internet’s infinite sprawl. These films become interchangeable the moment they’re over, in which case Oldman’s calamitous vocal work may be an asset if for no other reason than setting this apart from the slew of all-but-identical duds. Tau may go down as an awkward thorn in Oldman’s filmography, but it’ll be right at home in Netflix’s content library.
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