Stowaway - Space film review

Boy, do I love my space films. I love the science, the professionalism, the sheen of truly great spacefaring movies like Alien, The Martian, Gravity, Interstellar and Star Trek. And Netflix sure loves them too – The Cloverfield Paradox, IO, The Midnight Sky and now Stowaway. Unfortunately, Netflix’s love for the space above them does not compensate for the lack of creative space between their ears, as their latest space-faring adventure proves for the fourth time.

Directed by Brazilian YouTuber Joe Penna (a sentence I will never get used to writing), Stowaway follows Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim and Toni Collette as they find an unfortunate engineer (Shamier Anderson) who is accidentally in the rocket when it launches. They must debate if they can save this man with their dwindling life-support systems – and that’s pretty much the movie, people sitting around and talking about if they are required to blow this engineer out of an airlock.

Already, the movie is on a rough start because a “stowaway” refers to someone who deliberately hid themselves in a mode of transportation, while poor Anderson was just in the rocket working on shit when they launched it. Come to think of it, why did they launch the rocket when he was still in it? And why did he end up in the system of the space station they launched to rather than remain in the rocket system – I’m getting ahead of myself.

You may have noted in my introduction that I didn’t call the characters by their names or job titles like I usually do – I just called them by their actor’s names, except for Anderson because I haven’t seen him before. That’s because everyone in this film is just playing a version of themselves, rather than creating a character. There’s very little distinguishing each character from one another and their actor’s personas, and so the movie becomes very flat. Alien takes its time to establish individual traits for its trucker-level, grounded characters, but Stowaway just had the actors do their thing and go.

It’s unfortunate, as these are talented actors who do sometimes get to shine through, but their characters never get to fully develop. There’s no humour, no sense of realism to them, no real chemistry – they’re actors only.

In regard to the central quandary of the film – do they kill this guy or not – the movie feels very oddly muted and often perfunctory in how it handles the situation. The characters will hold major information from one another to build tension that will never be mentioned again, and the film is never bold enough to actually answer its questions in a satisfying way. There’s no bravery or desire to describe this theme and its implications, making the film even more uninvolving than it actually is.

Beyond that, the writing for this movie is just plain bad in spots. I already mentioned the character blandness and how perfunctory some scenes feel, but the movie has problems with pacing, structure and dialogue without. It’s so uninvolving that I was thinking of zingers throughout to respond to anything that was happening or being said, because the film is so plodding and the emotional beats failing to hit because of the lack of character work.

The scientific and technical accuracy is also hilariously bad, almost buffoonish in how nothing makes sense (such as “Hi, I’m a botanist and biochemist who knows nothing about medicine. Here’s some sodium thiopental which I say is going to kill you painlessly, but I’m not qualified at all to say that because I don’t have a medicine degree, and in real life, this drug does not do that at all.”).

Perhaps the worst offender for me is the surprisingly low production value. Having come off the sheer technical brilliance of Netflix originals such as Mitchells vs. the Machines, Roma, The Irishman and even the aforementioned-bad The Midnight Sky, Stowaway is like a stage production in comparison. While the production design and special effects aren’t necessarily bad, there’s no character of its own. It looks like it was taken from the set of any sci-fi movie.

Penna’s handling of cinematography, not using any interesting framing or symmetry, compounds and piles on the flat feeling of this whole film, seeming to sleepwalk behind the camera. Even the scenes where he goes for colour and emotion don’t land because of how the script has so poorly set up these moments with logical and scientific flaws, making them sleep-inducingly bad.

Easily the funniest thing about this movie, though? It just ends way before these characters ever reach Mars and get to a resolution about many other problems. I take that as a directorial interpretation that 5 minutes after the movie ends, the ship just explodes for no reason, like how many of the Saw movies end (e.g. Jeff gets new quest at end of Saw III, Jeff dies literally 1 minute after he’s introduced in Saw IV). That would have been entertaining.

Stowaway gets a C-.

I heard that Penna’s earlier movie Arctic starring Mads Mikkelsen was actually pretty great, so I might have some hope for him as a director in future. But I don’t recommend this one.

Have you seen Stowaway? If so, what did you think of it? Leave your answers in the comments below.