Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stowaway’ on Netflix, a Perilous Interplanetary Thriller Putting Astronauts in Yet Another Space Jam

Netflix’s Stowaway may have us wondering, what hath Gravity wrought? Although astronaut movies have been a staple of cinema for decades, the genre has experienced a serious resurgence in the seven-plus years since Alfonso Cuaron’s knuckle-biter (because we chewed PAST our fingernails, you see) became a box-office smash and lined its mantle with Oscars. Now, everyone and their sister wants to miss their loved ones back on Earth while they get all contemplative about their place in space and life and the universe, with well-timed action sequences threatening to render them floating debris in the icy black void. In Stowaway, it’s Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette and Daniel Dae Kim’s turn, under the guidance of director Joe Penna (Arctic), and here’s hoping it doesn’t find us feeling space-d out.

STOWAWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: 10… 9… 8… you know the rest of this. Notably not a NASA rocket, but one that says Hyperion on the side, probably because space travel is corporately privatized in this wholly plausible future reality, is heading to Mars for a two-year mission. Three astronauts are on board: Pragmatic commander Marina Barnett (Collette), perky medic Zoe Levenson (Kendrick) and queasy biologist David Kim (Kim). They rumble and shake and jostle and FEEL THE GEES as Earth gets smaller and smaller behind them. There’s a bloop on a panel and a raised eyebrow, and Marina’s finger hovers over the ABORT switch, but mission control says it’s nothing they can’t handle, so she doesn’t flip it. Bad idea jeans? Or good idea culottes? Guess we’re gonna find out.

Everything’s going smashingly after a few hours. David’s space nausea has abated, Marina has checked the fleen panel and the safety whatsits and Zoe has visited the observation deck to check out the highly poetic view of her home planet slowly becoming a pale blue dot. They eat some microwaved stuff right out of the packet because food is fuel, not entertainment; they participate in a media interview, talking about how excited they are to go to Mars and praising their compadres for being kickass highly competent individuals. Their craft is a big spinnamajig with long poles attached to a thing with solar panels and then some more long poles with a cylinder on the end of it. It makes sense to some engineer out there, I’m sure, be they real or fictional, but the point is, its physical construction won’t have anything at all to do with what happens later in the movie. OR WILL IT.

Anyway, Marina’s walking around the tightly constructed spaces of their ship when she looks up at a panel and sees blood oozing from the corner. She removes the screws and out falls unconscious Michael (Shamier Anderson), who pins her forearm to the floor, and notably is not an alien with large sharp teeth, because that’s always a possibility in these movies, isn’t it? Zoe stitches up Michael’s wound and 3-D prints a cast for Marina’s injured arm, which I promise isn’t a plot device (I lied; it’s totally a plot device). When Michael comes to, he’s shocked. He’s a launch support engineer for Hyperion. His memory is fuzzy. But he clearly isn’t supposed to be here, and he doesn’t want to be here, but here he is, in outer frickin’ space, and there’s no turning back so he might as well get used to eating packet-gruel. It takes a surprisingly short time for him to perk up despite being away from his beloved sister who depends on him, because hey, it’s not every day you get to go to Mars. The mood is OK for a bit but dampens when Marina points out that Michael being stuck in that compartment damaged the life-support doohickey, and there’s only enough oxygen on the ship to support three people. So either one goes or they all go. Go where? You know where. Actually, you don’t. Because nobody knows where we go after death.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Gravity, Interstellar, Ad Astra, Proxima, First Man, The Midnight Sky, The Martian — and that’s just in recent memory, because you could add The Right Stuff, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apollo 13 too. And that’s just sticking to the (mostly) plausible-reality astronaut movies (OK, not sure Interstellar is wholly plausible, but it has to be mentioned), because spaceship-set stories like Alien and Sunshine are also in the same ballpark.

Performance Worth Watching: Cast admirably against type, Kendrick gives the most memorable performance among this small ensemble.

Memorable Dialogue: “If there’s really nothing we can do, we have to take someone’s life.” — Zoe lays it all out on the table

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Stowaway is very much the stuff of its genre: the observation deck that should be called the Contemplation Deck, the high-wire tension, the frantic communications with mission control, the inevitable spacewalk through the very spacey hazards of space. Astronaut movies come with suspense built-in, because the dangers are so immediate — one misstep and you’re frozen toast floating through the universe for eternity. The thinner the line between life and death, the greater the potential for a movie to grab and hold us in the moment.

If you’re a sucker for this stuff (guilty!), Stowaway works in spite of its flaws. The characters are thin; Michael adjusts to the idea of an unexpected two-year jaunt through the solar system far too easily, and the usually charismatic Collette is especially underused. It becomes a combo astronaut-thriller and psych-thriller, and its reach exceeds its grasp by a length or two. It boasts a couple of obvious plot holes, transparently contrives third-act peril, and doesn’t fully exploit the potential of the premise, ultimately failing to be the profound statement on mortality that it seems to want to be.

Yet the lively rapport among the cast works in the film’s favor, and we only hear one side of the communiques with Earth — watching Collette participate in one side of a conversation adds to the tension. We’ve been convinced by these types of visual effects and smartly designed interior-spacecraft sets many times before, and they’re just as convincing here. Penna is a skilled filmmaker, capable of exploiting the immediate exigency of living in the most inhospitable of environs. He also capably pays homage to the great quick-thinking problem-solvers of everyone from the Apollo program to the International Space Station, which all the best movies of this genre tend to do. Stowaway is derivative but involving for nearly two hours, and you can’t say that about many movies.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Stowaway is a bit been-there-done-that, but for those of us who are OK with the yoozh for narratives that exit the atmosphere, it’s worth a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Stowaway on Netflix