Post by Dracula on Jun 12, 2021 11:04:31 GMT -5
Stowaway(5/28/2021)
Stowaway is a movie that sort of snuck up on me. It doesn’t have big name director behind it, it hasn’t benefited from any kind of festival run, and while the film appears to have been produced independently it’s being distributed by Netflix, who have done basically nothing to hype its release and are basically treating it like a piece of disposable content to appear in the middle of April without even a token theatrical run. Despite that it has been championed by some critics and I can see why. It’s a film with a pretty interesting concept: a crew of three astronauts in some near but not too near future have launched into space bound for a base on Mars but soon discover there’s a fourth person on board, a technician working on the launch who had some sort of accident that left him unconscious in the ship’s crawlspace. They can’t turn around but think they can make this work until the ship’s life support system has a malfunction and it becomes clear that there won’t be enough air on board to sustain all four of them the whole way, setting up quite the moral dilemma. The film was made with a relatively low budget for a space movie, but it doesn’t look too cheap or like necessary corners were cut in order to make what is ultimately more of a hard sci-fi character drama than a space opera. It also supports a reasonably impressive cast with the likes of Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, and Daniel Dae Kim making up the crew and Shamier Anderson playing the stowaway. The movie sort of leaves you in suspense because you keep expecting it to make a goofy left turn and get stupid, but for the most part it doesn’t: the stowaway doesn’t turn out to be a spy, none of the crew turns out to be a secret psychopath, aliens don’t show up, and for the most part it doesn’t cheat or take the easy way out of the various moral quandaries that the situation entails. I won’t spoil too much more, I don’t think this will go down as a science fiction classic or anything, it’s a bit too small and enclosed, but then I said that about Ex Machina as well and that thing has held up pretty well, maybe this will too.
***1/2 out of Five
Stowaway is a movie that sort of snuck up on me. It doesn’t have big name director behind it, it hasn’t benefited from any kind of festival run, and while the film appears to have been produced independently it’s being distributed by Netflix, who have done basically nothing to hype its release and are basically treating it like a piece of disposable content to appear in the middle of April without even a token theatrical run. Despite that it has been championed by some critics and I can see why. It’s a film with a pretty interesting concept: a crew of three astronauts in some near but not too near future have launched into space bound for a base on Mars but soon discover there’s a fourth person on board, a technician working on the launch who had some sort of accident that left him unconscious in the ship’s crawlspace. They can’t turn around but think they can make this work until the ship’s life support system has a malfunction and it becomes clear that there won’t be enough air on board to sustain all four of them the whole way, setting up quite the moral dilemma. The film was made with a relatively low budget for a space movie, but it doesn’t look too cheap or like necessary corners were cut in order to make what is ultimately more of a hard sci-fi character drama than a space opera. It also supports a reasonably impressive cast with the likes of Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, and Daniel Dae Kim making up the crew and Shamier Anderson playing the stowaway. The movie sort of leaves you in suspense because you keep expecting it to make a goofy left turn and get stupid, but for the most part it doesn’t: the stowaway doesn’t turn out to be a spy, none of the crew turns out to be a secret psychopath, aliens don’t show up, and for the most part it doesn’t cheat or take the easy way out of the various moral quandaries that the situation entails. I won’t spoil too much more, I don’t think this will go down as a science fiction classic or anything, it’s a bit too small and enclosed, but then I said that about Ex Machina as well and that thing has held up pretty well, maybe this will too.
***1/2 out of Five
