Keep Breathing streams on Netflix on July 28, 2022.

The survival drama is a paint-by-numbers formula. Take a terrified individual or group, drop them into the harsh wilderness, and follow them as they fall apart. Sprinkle in some interpersonal issues, and boom! You've got an easy show for just about any audience to follow…But that doesn’t always mean you’ve got something good, and unfortunately, Keep Breathing, Netflix’s latest take on the genre, is serviceable at best.

The limited series is an uninspired take on what shows like Lost did first – forcing “normal” people to survive in the wilderness – without any of the supernatural elements that made that series interesting. It’s a weird mishmash of action and melodrama that somehow manages to make surviving in the wild even less exciting than our heroine’s personal flashbacks. The result? An extremely rote series that's mercifully over in just six episodes.

Attorney Liv (Melissa Barrera) has made it her mission to meet someone near the Canadian wilderness before she returns to her normal life, but her flight has been canceled. Desperate, she turns to two men she finds in the airport headed to the same destination. They reluctantly agree to take her with them, but disaster strikes when the plane goes down. With both men eventually succumbing to their injuries and the plane submerged underwater, Liv must survive on her own as long as she possibly can…with little hope of being rescued.

It's all extremely standard survival fare: the work-first attorney struggles to adapt to the situation, all while reflecting on the failures that led up to this moment. Interspersed with colorful vignettes that give us a peek into Liv's life before the crash, Keep Breathing showcases the young lawyer's determination to survive the wilderness – even if that means burning piles of money she finds in luggage and burying the oxycodone she found with it.

Because as it turns out, living alone in the wilderness is hard. This show really wants to remind you of this fact every time you tune in, and about how hard its protagonist is working to make sure she stays alive. Liv dives underwater again and again to recover equipment from the plane, only to find herself face to face with a hungry bear tearing through her food stores. She doesn’t quite know where to take shelter at first. There’s nothing to distract her from her absent mother and doting father’s death…or the skeletons in her closet. But she finds a way, of course, because Keep Breathing wants us to root for Liv, even when she’s as milquetoast of a survivor as humanly possible.

As resourceful as Liv appears to be, figuring out which berries are okay to eat and crafting her own compass, she also shows little common sense. Why burn piles of money when there's plenty of wood around to set ablaze? And why dump out perfectly good medication (despite the potential for complications) when there are dangers lurking around every corner? It would come in handy if she happened to break her arm or get in a tussle with a bear. There’s no real explanation for these decisions, other than the fact that it’s just more dramatic that way, apparently. An attorney burning money? Seems a bit on the nose.

And of course, there also comes a particularly predictable reveal that often surrounds women in movies and TV who are facing already-difficult predicaments. For spoiler reasons, we won’t say exactly what that reveal entails, but it sets up exactly the kind of staid writing I'd expect from anything where a strong woman is meant to pull herself out of a seemingly insurmountable situation.

This twist adds little to the plot and only serves as a reminder that, if there's a chance for a woman to star in a series where she must use everything at her disposal to survive, she's still somehow got to be taking care of someone else. Because the last thing a woman should be taking care of is herself, apparently, and writing like this only serves to drive that harmful narrative home.

Otherwise, it seems the rest of Liv’s time willing herself to survive is dominated by men as well. If she’s not lost in thought about the death of her father, she’s daydreaming about her on- and off-again relationship with coworker Danny (Jeff Wilbusch), or tormented by Sam (Austin Stowell), one of the men she hitched a ride with.

Frustratingly, there's no real explanation for why Sam was so intent on no one coming out to save them after the plane crash. Assuming the men’s Cessna departed from the same airport Liv had visited, it had to have communicated with air traffic controllers. There's some sort of record, to be sure, of the flight and even its potential destination, despite what Sam says, requiring a bit too much suspension of disbelief from us.

There's also no reason for a device the series goes on to use: the deceased Sam acting as a negative voice that continues to tell Liv she's going to die. She has no personal connection to Sam prior to the accident, and he serves no real purpose other than to be a detractor so we can feel good about Liv's victories. And from what we knew about him during his brief time alive, there's little reason to assume he'd be this unfriendly to someone struggling to keep herself alive long enough to seek rescue.

On the bright side, Keep Breathing is visually pleasing, with fantastic camera work, an inspired score, and great acting from its core cast. It’s so unfortunate, then, that it fails to deliver any real staying power thanks to a boring setup and an even more boring cast of characters that fail to make any real impression. The best there is to say? Keep Breathing is an average show, at least, if you just need something to watch.

Thirteen Lives opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago theaters on July 29 with a release on Prime Video Aug. 5.

In 2018, the whole world was transfixed by the Tham Luang Nang Non disaster which found 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach trapped inside an almost impenetrable underground cave network after a flash flood. With global news coverage, the details of the dive-based rescue operation had humanity on the edge of their seats. But the true drama was happening amongst the boys’ families, the Thai authorities trying to save them, and the international volunteers who amassed to work out many plans of action. Director Ron Howard recreates that moment in real time, bringing his camera into the depths of the caves to give us a tense and uncompromising diver’s-eye-view of the impossible plan to bring them out alive. Thrilling, hopeful, and revealing, Thirteen Lives is Howard once again putting audiences right in the thick of the peril, turning a global event into a personal story of will and then triumph.

Howard opens the film with a prologue that sets the context of the soccer team and their average, everyday lives in Northern Thailand. Excited about a birthday party that evening, they pregame with their coach (Teeradon Supapunpinyo) by visiting a local underground cave for some amateur spelunking. Open to the public and safe outside of monsoon months, they venture in with flashlights for what is usual playtime for the kids – but then an unexpectedly early monsoon storm douses the mountain and surroundings with incredible rains. When the kids don’t show up to the party that night, their parents drive to the caves and find all 13 bikes at the mouth of the cave, but no boys.

The Thai response is swift as the local Governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) — who is a political lame duck and potential scapegoat if needed — and the Thai Navy SEALS set up an operations post outside the cave. The locals also rally together to feed and support the parents who camp out on site, while other locals and even expats, like British cave diver Vern Unsworth (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), share their knowledge of the cave interiors. There’s even a former local engineer who takes personal time from his job in Bangkok to travel to the site to ask locals to help him dam the sinkholes on the mountain so the flowing water won’t stop the rescue efforts. All of this staging is integral to setting up the competency of the efforts and how, despite the thousands of global volunteers, making it clear the civilians were the core of the operation. And this setup is told entirely in the language of the region, which means they’re not afterthoughts in their own story.

Using each day of the recovery as a title touchstone, Howard uses his documentarian skills to set up a clear timeline, with visual markers on a map of the caves for progress context, while folding in new players as the efforts ramp up. By June 25, the Thai SEALS do an exploratory dive and find tight obstacles and low visibility in the caves is prohibitive. That’s when two expert British cave divers, Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), are summoned by Unsworth because of their singular experience. It creates some friction for the SEAL Commander Kiet (Thira Chutikul), but Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson rightly don’t lean into overblown posturing to augment the drama. It’s subtly drawn and allows the film to maintain focus on the bigger picture of everyone’s goal of getting the 13 out alive.

To the credit of Mortensen and Farrell, they modulate their performances extremely well as disparate friends who are pragmatic about the situation. Where Stanton is too blunt, Volanthen is the warmer messenger, who uses his empathy as the father of a boy the same age as the missing kids, to help keep the Thai operations team hopeful yet extremely cognizant of the unlikely odds facing them. They’re bolstered by Joel Edgerton’s empathetic turn as Dr. Harry Harris, a diver and anesthetist from Australia, who arrives to consult on the most provocative potential solution. His expertise is needed to create a reasonable plan in getting the team out of the caves for what will essentially be a five to seven-hour dive; in other words, a bleak test of will for even the most experienced diver.

Smartly, Howard does frequent check-ins with the anguished, waiting parents and community, so the film doesn’t pivot into a story about the western heroes. But the overall piece would have benefited if there was a Thai character that was afforded as central a place in the story as the English-speaking actors, with asides to their personal lives or connection to the region. Nicholson sort of goes there with the Commander and his returning SEAL graduate Saman (Sukollawat Kanarot), but it’s not explored in a satisfying way. However, Thai folklore regarding the cave, the region’s cultural practices, and religion are woven throughout, including the complexity of the Myanmar immigrant issues, three of whom are in the caves, and the concern by their parents that they won’t get saved with the Thai children. All of those choices fill in the details of the story likely unknown by broader audiences and make the telling more robust and thoughtful.

Where Thirteen Lives really excels is in how Howard and Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom capture the bone-chilling claustrophobia of what the divers had to traverse to get to the survivors. From stalactite obstacle courses, to murky, treacherous sightlines and heavy currents, the cameras are often positioned right on the water-line and then submerge with the divers for their authentic aquatic perspective. Augmented with exceptional sound design that accentuates the alien nature of it all, they manage to make the normally mundane flow of water menacing. It’s often an overwhelming auditory and visual experience that necessarily puts the audience right in the peril of every foot gained within the caves.

The stressful final act tracks the nail-biting rescue effort itself, with the Thai government, the Governor, and the divers secretly agreeing to try the most extreme option, which is truly the only option. The tension of watching the mortal divers weigh the responsibility of safely returning the 13, but also the Thai divers who stayed with them to monitor their rapidly degenerating surroundings, will leave you squirming in your seat. As one of the divers says pre-dive, they would have been heroes saving one of the boys, but now it’s all or nothing, and you feel that in every frame. Howard uses every lesson he’s absorbed from Apollo 13 and his documentary efforts to imbue Thirteen Lives with all of the drama, tension, and realism of what happened to give us a needed reminder of human resilience, and the capacity we have to sacrifice and care when the situation calls us to rise to the occasion.

If you find yourself in the enviable position of getting new hardware for your gaming PC, it's worth taking the time to make sure you’re getting components that are going to serve you well. When it comes to types of storage, there’s two choices; SSD and HDD. SSDs offer more speed, but why are they so much more expensive when they have so much less space compared to HDD?

We’re going to dig into the technology of hard drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) so you get a clear picture of storage options, the advantages to each, and where you might want to invest your money for your next PC upgrade.

Jump to:

1. What is a Hard Drive?
2. What is an SSD?
3. Types of SSD
4. SSDs vs Hard Drives

What is a Hard Drive?

While there’s nothing soft about an SSD, hard drives pack an actual hard disc (called the platter) into their body. Inside the hard drive, there’s a motorized actuator arm that rapidly moves a rear/write head across the surface of the disc. This is fairly similar to how an analog record player works in that the disc spins constantly while the head reads data off the disc as it rotates. The difference is that a hard drive disc is using magnetism to read that data instead of a needle staking over the grooves on the record. The hard drive can also write data to the disc, and it doesn’t read all the data in order, instead jumping around frequently to read lines of data all over the disc in succession.

Hard drives aren’t limited to having just one platter and one read/write head. High-capacity drives can have several. For most consumer hard drives, you’ll be looking at a unit that comes packed into a 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drive size, and connects to your PC using a SATA data connector as well as a separate power connector.

What is an SSD?

SSDs work very differently. They use any number of flash storage chips to store data. There’s no moving parts inside the drive, just moving electrons. Despite the different hardware, some SSDs still come in a compact drive similar in size to the 2.5-inch hard drives, connecting to PCs using the same SATA data connector and separate power connector. However, consumer SSDs come in many different flavors that are worth briefly exploring.

SSD Types: NVMe vs m.2 vs SATA

While shopping, you’ll generally find yourself faced with a few different types of SSDs.

1. There are the 2.5-inch SATA SSDs that look identialy to their hard drive counterparts. These tend to be the cheaper options.
2. Then, there are an assortment of SSDs that don’t come in an enclosure and connect directly to ports on the motherboard.
   1. In this category, you’ll find mSATA SSDs, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe SSDs, each with a distinct connector on the motherboard (i.e., they’re not interchangeable). M.2 NVMe SSDs use a computer's high-bandwidth PCIe connection to transmit data, while the mSATA and M.2 SATA SSDs still use the slower SATA for data transmission.
3. There are also PCIe SSDs that slot into standard PCIe slots – the same ones graphics cards and other expansion cards slot into – instead of the specialized M.2 sockets.

SSDs vs Hard Drives: Head-to-head

Durability

When it comes to durability, SSDs generally get the win here. Without moving parts, they’re able to withstand bumps and movement without much fuss. With the moving parts in hard drives, even a small fall could damage the actuator arm or motors that spin the disc. And once either of those parts stops working, the drive is out for the count unless you opt for expensive data restoration.

Longevity

For long-term storage, hard drives are the way to go. Not only can you get more storage space for cheap (perfect for backing up a ton of data) but the data storage on a physical hard disc is more safely stored than it would be in flash memory cells. The data in SSDs is stored as an electrical charge in flash memory, and electrical charge can leak. Unless you’re looking at very long-term storage (like a decade or more), though, this is likely not going to be an issue that comes up.

Speeds

Sorry, hard drives, but SSDs have you beat handedly here. Even 7,200RPM hard drives reading data exclusively from the disc’s outer edge (where it’s moving the fastest won’t beat the 500MB/s+ read speeds of SATA SSDs. And SATA SSDs are the slow ones.

You can find some newer, high-end SSDs clocking in well above 7,000MB/s. Since SSDs don’t need to rely on a physical read/write head moving around a disc to find and access data, they can also perform much faster for random operations, which will be the bulk of what your drives do unless you’re transferring big files all the time.

Interface

In this guide, you’ve seen “SATA” a lot. Everything using that interface is limited by the 6Gbps speed cap of SATA III, or potentially less if it’s SATA II (3Gbps) or SATA I (1.5Gbps). For everyday use, that’s actually still plenty fast.

That said, M.2 NVMe SSDs can go substantially faster using PCIe. There’s still a speed limit on PCIe, but it’s way higher. You’ll often find M.2 NVMe SSDs using four PCIe lanes, which allows for 4GB/s on PCIe 3.0, 8GB/s on PCIe 4.0, and 16GB/s on the recently introduced PCIe 5.0.

Size/Weight

This is another big win for SSDs. No big, metal disc. No clunky moving parts. SSDs can be downright tiny. You’ll even find some that are about the size of a single Triscuit. The most common M.2 SSD size you’re likely to find is the M.2 2280, which is a lot smaller and lighter than a 2.5-inch, which in turn is smaller and lighter than a 3.5-inch drive. It may not matter as much inside a desktop computer, but if you’re building inside an mini ITX case or upgrading storage inside a laptop, it can start to matter quickly. M.2 also slot directly into the motherboard so you don’t have to worry about running more SATA and power cables.

Cost vs. Capacity

Here’s the rub. In an ideal world, you can get heaps and heaps of storage that’s both fast and cheap, but this isn’t the reality unfortunately.

Faster storage invariably costs more. Where you can snag a 8TB hard drive for about $150, you’ll likely only get 1TB in an SSD that uses PCIe 4.0 for the same amount of money. If you’re space-constricted and can only get one drive, you might opt for a medium-capacity drive with moderate speeds, like a cheaper M.2 NVMe SSD.

If you can combine multiple drives in your system, using both an SSD and HDD is a great option.

• Use a faster but smaller SSD for your operating system and most-used applications.
• Then have a spacious hard drive to keep your large files and documents that don’t need to be accessed as frequently.
• A hard drive is best for files and applications that don’t really need much speed, so keep your PC games on your SSD.

Mark Knapp is a regular contributor to IGN Tech and an irregular Tweeter on Twitter @Techn0Mark.

Toei Animation’s Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac is back. The first two episodes of the forthcoming series Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac – Battle for Sanctuary will premiere together on Crunchyroll on Sunday, July 31 at 1:00 pm PT.

Following that, one episode will be released weekly, in both subbed and dubbed versions. The season will also be a true Simulcast and Simuldub (in this case, day and date in both English and Spanish).

But you can’t wait that long for a fix of Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac – Battle for Sanctuary? Don’t worry. IGN has you covered!

You can watch an exclusive clip from it via the player above or the embed below.

Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac ran on Netflix between 2019 and 2020 and loosely adapted the “Galaxian Wars,” “Black Knights” and “Silver Saints” story arcs from the 1980s Japanese manga series.

So what will Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac – Battle for Sanctuary cover? Here’s the official plot synopsis to shed some light on that:

"The young warriors who protect the goddess Athena are known as the Knights of the Zodiac. One young orphan, Seiya, is destined to become the Pegasus Knight. Athena has been born into this world, but this time under a dark prophecy that she will lose the war against Poseidon and Hades, and lead mankind to ruin. Seiya stands up against the prophecy, willing to protect her at all costs. But now a god-killer arrow has struck her heart. To save her life, Seiya must ascend Sanctuary and defeat twelve legendary Gold Knights – and he only has twelve hours to do it. Will he make it? And what will happen to the dark prophecy if he succeeds?"

Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac – Battle for Sanctuary will be released in the following subtitled languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.

The Japanese, English, and Spanish voice casts are listed below:

• Andromeda Shun – Satomi Satou (Japanese Voice); Luci Christian (English Voice); Isabel Martiñon (Latin American Spanish Voice)
• Cygnus Magnus – Hiroaki Miura (Japanese Voice); Patrick Poole (English Voice); Alfonso Herrera (Latin American Spanish Voice)
• Dragon Shiryu – Takahiro Sakurai (Japanese Voice); Blake Shepard (English Voice); Ricardo Mendoza (Latin American Spanish Voice)
• Athena – Fumiko Orikasa (Japanese Voice); Emily Neves (English Voice); Maria Fernanda Morales (Latin American Spanish Voice)
• Pegasus Seiya – Masakazu Morita (Japanese Voice); Bryson Baugus (English Voice); Darío Yazbek Bernal (Latin American Spanish Voice)
• Phoenix Nero – Katsuyuki Konishi (Japanese Voice); Adam Gibbs (English Voice); Marcos Patiño (Latin American Spanish Voice)

The first two episodes of Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac – Battle for Sanctuary launch July 31 at 1:00 pm PT on Crunchyroll.

While Neil LaBute is known as one of America’s most acclaimed playwrights (The Shape of Things, Reasons to Be Pretty) and indie filmmakers (In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors), he has also dabbled in genre films and television, namely the Nicolas Cage-starring remake of The Wicker Man and as the creator of the TV series Van Helsing.

Writer-director LaBute’s next stab at genre filmmaking is the gothic thriller House of Darkness, which IGN can exclusively debut the trailer for today. You can watch the trailer via the player above or the embed below.

LaBute’s plays and films have proven controversial for their depictions of sexual politics, even as they've also been praised for their sharp dialogue and dark humor.

Judging from the trailer. House of Darkness has all those familiar LaBute elements at play within the trappings of a seductive, gothic thriller.

The cast features Justin Long (Tusk, Drag Me to Hell), Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns, 21), Gia Crovatin (Van Helsing), and Lucy Walters (Get Shorty).

Here’s the official plot synopsis to shed more light on House of Darkness:

“Driving home to her secluded estate after meeting at a local bar, a player out to score thinks his beautiful, mysterious date will be another casual hook-up. While getting acquainted, their flirtation turns playful, sexy, and sinister. Hoping to get lucky, his luck may have just run out.”

House of Darkness is rated R and will be released theatrically by Saban Films on September 9, 2022, and on digital and On Demand on September 13.