‘The Silent Sea’ Sees the ‘Squid Game’ Cast Reunite for a Spooky Space Thriller

The Silent Sea is the story of a group of astronauts who are sent to an abandoned off-world outpost full of fluorescent lights and white and gray décor, and dark, dank hallways and navigable air vents. At this station, the visitors locate a lone inhabitant who may want one of them as their surrogate mother, and they eventually learn that their mission is not what it first appeared, thanks to the ulterior motives of their bigwig bosses. There’s also, of course, an extraterrestrial menace that threatens to doom them all, as well as Earth’s entire population, should it manage to make the journey back home with them. All of which is to say that, while it may be nominally based on his 2014 short film The Sea of Tranquility, Choi Hang-yong’s eight-episode Netflix series (Dec. 24) is the latest progeny of James Cameron’s sci-fi classic Aliens.

There’s a contemporary twist to The Silent Sea that sets it apart from Cameron’s illustrious 1986 sequel. Unfortunately, though, it can’t compensate for the been-here, done-that nature of Choi’s saga, which sticks to such a rote routine that it never generates serious suspense. That’s not for lack of trying; aesthetically polished and marked by fine performances from a cast led by Train to Busan’s Gong Yoo and Sense8 star Bae Doona, it’s the latest watchable South Korean streaming import following recent standouts Squid Game, Dr. Brain and Hellbound. Yet what it boasts in formal proficiency it lacks in genuine novelty or excitement, making it the sort of ho-hum genre effort that’ll best be enjoyed by those without a deep knowledge of the more accomplished ancestors from which it liberally borrows.

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Choi’s series is set in a future wracked by extreme climate change that’s resulted in rising temperatures, rampant wild fires, skyrocketing infant mortality rates, incessant disease, and—most calamitous of all—record-low rainfall that’s created a Great Drought. In response to this arid new reality, the South Korean government has instituted the Fair Water Distribution Act, which assigns each citizen a classification that determines the amount of water they receive. While protests rage against this system of inequality, most dutifully stand in long lines at water pumps where they can fill up their translucent portable tanks. With supplies dwindling, however, Earth stands on the brink of collapse, which is ostensibly why South Korea established its Balhae station on the moon.

Five years before the events of The Silent Sea, an enigmatic catastrophe took place at Balhae, resulting in the deaths of all 117 employees. Nonetheless, at the behest of their superiors—including Squid Game’s Heo Sung-tae—a team is sent to Balhae to recover mysterious samples that were left behind. That group is led by military man Han Yoon-jae (Gong Yoo) and astrobiologist-turned-ethologist Dr. Song Ji-an (Bae Doona), as well as a collection of archetypal pilots and professionals whose primary job is to supply comic relief, cause trouble through irrational and treacherous behavior, and/or perish courtesy of the hazards present at Balhae. Not helping their one-dimensionality, Park Eun-kyo’s script has each character describe themselves—or each other—in the bluntest of terms, so that Han is immediately greeted as “the famous elite soldier of the military” and Song is derided as “smart, boring, conceited and condescending.”

Han and Song are initially at odds with each other, since he wants to simply complete their mission and she is more concerned with figuring out what transpired five years prior. As it turns out, both of those objectives have to do with the samples the squad has been commissioned to find. Their task proves more difficult than expected, given that the facility’s three storage units have been cleared out, and all records of their contents have been erased. What they do stumble upon from the outset, though, is a litany of corpses, whose veiny complexions and foamy mouths indicate an unavoidable, if puzzling, state of affairs: everyone at Balhae seems to have drowned.

The Silent Sea strives to keep things tense via intermittent showstoppers, from the crew struggling to vacate their crash-landed ship before it plummets into a bottomless canyon, to Han venturing down a perilous ladder in order to repair Balhae’s communication link with Earth. It also occasionally dramatizes drowning via slow-motion images of individuals sinking into a pitch-black ocean—a sight that’s at once harrowing and, because of the show’s premise, also a bit soothing. Still, no amount of directorial flair can make up for the blandness of the action, nor the obviousness of the mystery, which soon revolves around the fact that the samples Han, Song and company seek contain lunar water with frightening multiplication properties. Just as troublesome is a shadowy intruder who moves around the station at superhuman speed via a network of ventilation shafts, indicating that they’re exceedingly familiar with these environs—and thus might be a survivor from Balhae’s original team.

Xenomorphs are nowhere to be found in The Silent Sea, but in numerous other respects, Choi’s series walks in the well-trod footsteps of Cameron’s predecessor, right down to the familial dynamics that develop between Han, Song and Balhae’s long-standing resident. Alas, it never truly indulges in the terrifying mayhem of Cameron’s Aliens—nor the nightmarish horror of Ridley Scott’s seminal Alien. Instead, it teases bombshells that habitually fizzle out. Sporadic flashbacks to Han caring for his ailing daughter (i.e. the reason he’s on this mission in the first place) and Song’s investigation into her dead sister’s scientific work help deepen the protagonists, albeit not to an extent that makes one care much about the oh-so-dastardly conspiracy they uncover during the course of their lunar stay.

The Silent Sea’s revelation regarding Balhae’s purpose raises a moral question with which the show isn’t willing to grapple. Consequently, even its big finale is neutered of the very complexity that might make it stand out amidst so much likeminded science-fiction fare. For all of the heart and intensity that Gong and Bae bring to their roles, their Han and Song are just run-of-the-mill outer space heroes, trying to save the world while wrestling with personal dilemmas and private demons. Modern ecological-disaster slant notwithstanding, their tale is a handsome but inherently soggy retread.

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