A three-person voyage to Mars is jeopardized by the discovery
of a fourth passenger who accidentally ended up onboard. DRAMA/SCI-FI
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Stowaway (2021)Directed by Joe Penna
Written by Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison Starring Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson |
There's been a recent influx of sci-fi dramas in the past few years, beginning I think with Gravity. Since then, we've gotten films like Passengers, Ad Astra, The Martian, High Life, Interstellar, and Voyagers, and that's just scratching the surface. All of these films have a similar tone and plot structure, and they all tend to bleed together because of it. Stowaway is another one in the same vein, with thin characters and a bare-bones plot that doesn't drag you in. Its highest points are its production design and the performances from all four actors.
A three-person manned mission to Mars is underway. There's Captain Barnett (Collette), Zoe Levenson (Kendrick), and David Kim (Kim). Each plays a vital role to the ongoing mission, which will take two years to complete. Everything changes when they find a stowaway, an engineer named Michael Adams (Anderson), who got trapped in the life support system before takeoff. His presence threatens the mission, since the ship was designed to sustain the lives of only three people. Now, they have a difficult choice to make, but the film never goes as far as it should with that choice. We get a predictable self-sacrifice ending that doesn't feel like it really changed anything, and it's abrupt as well. Stowaway has potential, but it feels like all the other sci-fi dramas of the 2010's and 2020's. You grab one or two famous faces, put them in an astronaut suit, spout off some jargon about Earth no longer sustaining life, give them some emotional problems, and hire a good cinematographer to simulate space. It's been done a dozen times and it will be done a dozen more times. |