Iron Lung is in theaters now.
The mere existence of Iron Lung is impressive. The highly successful, highly viewed YouTuber Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, was so taken with the 2022 game Iron Lung that he decided to turn it into a movie, which he self-financed, wrote, directed, edited and stars in. And rather than debuting on Digital or YouTube, it’s getting a real deal wide theatrical release. That’s one hell of an accomplishment.
If only the passion Fischbach clearly has for the game and the world David Szymanski created with it translated into something far more interesting on screen. Because wow, is Iron Lung a slog to get through.
Fischbach stars as a character continually referred to as Convict, thanks to his status as a convicted criminal. Our Convict is part of a decidedly bleak future where all of the universe’s stars and planets have vanished, with humanity’s last hope presumably resting at the depths of a literal ocean of blood located on a remote moon that still remains.
For nearly the entirety of Iron Lung, Fischbach is the only person we see on screen, as his character embarks on his submarine mission. Though he does have radio communication with voices above, Convict is by himself on this mission and by himself as our sole focus for the film. And look, that is not inherently a bad thing. There have absolutely been plenty of good films in which we follow a character completely on their own.
But Iron Lung has terrible pacing and very low energy from the start. The scenarios that Fischbach has put his character in just aren’t compelling enough to watch unfold, with scenes that drag on and on. It was about 15 minutes into the movie that I started to think about how restless I was already… and then realized I had so much more time to go. Because this movie’s runtime is two full hours (and a couple of minutes on top of that) and it sure doesn’t earn that.
For far too long, we watch Fischbach turn knobs. We watch him look at screens. We watch him write down things. And sometimes, we watch him argue with voices on the other side of the radio. But it’s very rarely engaging. The movie has the tricky job of worldbuilding only through dialogue (and some narration at the top) to explain what is going on here and what life is like for the remnants of humanity. And though there are tiny slivers that feel intriguing – and I do love the game-derived term of “the Quiet Rapture” – little of it really takes hold or gives the audience enough to connect to. And too much of it is a guy yelling about something that hasn’t been properly explained in the first place.
As an actor, Fischbach is fine. As his YouTube audience knows, he has a genuine onscreen presence and his delivery is decent enough in his calmer moments. But his script and performance also have the tendency to lean into moments where he’s angry and gets really loud at the END OF A SENTENCE. And that gets old pretty quickly.
Off-screen voices are provided by a bevy of actors, including no less than Troy Baker. But it’s Caroline Rose Kaplan who gets the biggest secondary role as the most sympathetic of the voices the Convict speaks to. However, the attempt to sell any sort of genuine rapport between the two falls flat.
There is some good production design, which is based on the game itself of course, but which also owes a big debt – as do plenty of other films at this point – to Ridley Scott’s Alien with its dark, dingy take on a sci-fi setting. Like the game, there are old-school, analog-era digital screens, and the instruments on the sub (the Iron Lung of the title) all feel decades old, rather than from the far future. This is something we’ve seen cemented not just in the Alien franchise, as it continues a story first begun in the 1970s, but in all the stories influenced by it.
One sequence in particular feels reminiscent of Alien, as Convict needs to crawl through some tight ducts in a manner very similar to Tom Skerritt’s Dallas in that film. But imagine if that scene with Dallas removed any inherent stakes or tension or drama and you’d have this version. Just a guy moving through some ducts to do something, finish it, then crawl back to start doing something else.
Things pick up in the film’s final half hour when, well, stuff happens! There are a couple of solid makeup effects introduced at this point, and it’s also when we get to see the massive amounts of blood Fischbach has promised for Iron Lung (he wanted to outdo 2013’s blood-drenched Evil Dead sequel). But suddenly adding a bit of gore and a lot of blood so late in the story doesn’t retroactively justify how long it took to get there, nor does the film actually suddenly grab you more. Honestly, it just underlines how Iron Lung feels like it would have all been much better served as a short, rather than a feature film, where we got to this point so much sooner.
Video game composer Andrew Hulshult (Doom Eternal) provides a solid score, with he and sound editor Brad Engleking having the amusingly odd shared credit “Adrenaline Provided By” – which kind of feels like an admission that without some of the music and sound to slightly prop things up, Iron Lung could have felt even more ponderous.
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