REVIEW: ‘Stowaway’ explores the ethics of survival in space
Shamier Anderson, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim and Toni Collette in Stowaway, directed by Joe Penna.
Private spaceflight is having a bit of a moment lately. A quick glance at the news would have you believe that thanks to entities like SpaceX, we’re not that far away from moon bases and the multi-planetary humanity that Elon Musk dreams of. But the reality is a lot more fragile; any mission beyond our planet involves sealing astronauts into surprisingly thin-walled capsules, stocked with the barest of essentials. Even carrying a second coffee mug is an extravagance.
The new movie Stowaway takes pains to sketch out this fraught situation early on. We begin with the launch sequence of a 2-year mission to Mars, operated by a company called Hyperion, sometime in the not-too-distant future. Marina (Toni Collette) is piloting a shuttle, alongside Zoe (Anna Kendrick), a medical doctor, and David (Daniel Dae Kim), a biologist. During the ascent, Marina notices their engines aren’t performing as efficiently as they should. Nevertheless, they press on to their main ship, and begin the journey to the Red Planet.
But half a day into the trip - far enough that they don’t have fuel to return to Earth without resupplying on Mars - the crew makes a discovery. Stuck inside the panel of the life support system is an unconscious launch technician named Michael (Shamier Anderson). When he tumbles free, the life support system is damaged, causing an immediate moral quandary. Without enough oxygen for the suddenly expanded passenger list, how do all four characters survive the five months in space? Will someone have to sacrifice himself or herself for the good of the other three?
Shamier Anderson as Michael, on a trip to Mars against his will.
With just four characters onscreen, writer-director Joe Penna echoes his even more pared-down debut feature Arctic, which featured Mads Mikkelsen alone in the frozen tundra for most of the runtime. Another cost-saving measure in Stowaway: the ship uses a slingshot design to generate artificial gravity, meaning the production doesn’t have to burn too much budget on zero-G effects. It’s a clever solution, and a handful of lengthy long takes through the winding passageways help the movie look less like the stage play it would otherwise resemble.
Without a functioning life support system, the ethics of who lives and who dies becomes the core drama. As a doctor, Zoe sees the injured Michael as her patient, and understandably balks when mission control and Marina decide that Michael must be euthanized, in service of the mission. David, meanwhile, is more clear-headed: he hates the idea of killing Michael, but doesn’t want to see the lives of the crew or their years of research derailed because Michael was mysteriously trapped aboard.
Here, the script is too thin to really grapple with the moral dilemma. We get a few sequences where the characters individually break down due to the stress, but the drama never builds to the wrenching height that the situation demands. Maybe you can chalk that up to the immense training and professionalism that these characters would exemplify, but it did leave me a bit cold. Kendrick, Kim, Collette and Anderson are all good, but we get such bare sketch of their characters - Zoe and Michael are developed more than the other two - that they’re mostly kept at a remove.
Ever since 2013’s Gravity, there seems to be a filmmaking rule that no spacewalk scene can go smoothly. Stowaway is no exception - when the characters determine there may be a supply of oxygen stored in the rocket engine that brought the shuttle to the ship, Zoe and David venture outside to retrieve it. And like clockwork, there ensues a heart-pounding, hand-over-hand scramble along the skin of the vessel. On one score, these types of scenes are unrivalled in how they communicate just how vulnerable the astronauts are to flying away into the void. But they also have begun to take on a slightly contrived quality (see The Midnight Sky). Surely a mission like this would have a drone that could be piloted out to fetch the oxygen?
Anna Kendrick’s Zoe leads the movie’s spacewalk scene.
It’s odd, too, that once Michael joins the crew, no attention is paid to his circumstances in getting there. It’s taken for granted that people on Hyperion launches get stuffed behind panels (which apparently requires the panel being screwed into place) on a regular basis. I kept expecting the mystery to be revisited in the third act, and some revelation about a possible conspiracy would lead the characters to a solution to their air problem. But the movie isn’t really interested in making a villain out of Hyperion, beyond a few references to the profit-oriented decisions they made with the ship’s design.
There may be artificial gravity on the ship, but the story still feels like it’s floating. With no clear antagonist, and interpersonal conflict that doesn’t rise beyond an office squabble, the life-and-death stakes are unmoored. But the vague drama aside, Penna and his cast still provide an engaging space adventure. Stowaway may not be as much of a crowd-pleaser as The Martian, or as technically impressive as Gravity, but in the continuum of scientifically-accurate space movies, Stowaway is squarely in the middle - not a bad place for an up-and-coming director like Penna to be.
Stowaway gets two and a half stars out of four. It’s streaming now on Netflix in the U.S. and Amazon Prime Video in Canada.
Stray thoughts
When it comes to surviving on a crippled ship, nothing competes with Naomi Nagata’s arc on Season 5 of The Expanse.
I know there’s not a lot of obstacles between here and Mars, but would it really be smart to design a ship with such fragile-looking cables between the essential modules?
I hope we get a few YouTube breakdowns of the scientific accuracy of the movie.