Movie Breakdown: Stowaway
Pre-Screening Stance:
Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson – that’s a really nice cast for this sci-fi thriller. Here’s hoping Stowaway is as good as it appears to be on paper.
Post-Screening Ramble:
There’s a couple of good stories inside of Stowaway, but the film does well to steer clear of them. It begins with three astronauts – Marina (Toni Collette), Zoe (Anna Kendrick) and David (Daniel Dae Kim) – sitting in a rocket, waiting to kick off what will be a two-year mission to Mars. Unbeknownst to them, an engineer named Michael (Shamier Anderson) is unconscious and lodged in an out of sight spot on the ship, which means he’s now along for the ride.
I assumed that Michael’s unplanned presence and the mystery of whether or not he stowed away on purpose would drive the story here, but right away it’s designated as an accident and that’s that, thus eliminating the “thriller” part of Stowaway. Instead, the film goes with more of a generic space-is-hard theme, which sees the crew having to scramble after it’s determined that there’s only enough oxygen for three people, not four. Everyone’s purpose gets weighed, hard decisions get floated, impossible tasks get doled out – it’s all the usual stuff that can be expected from a movie about a space trip gone wrong. Weirdly, choosing who has to leave the ship could have also earned the film a thriller designation, but the crew very quickly decide that Michael is the odd man out, and he very quickly agrees with them. Who wants tension anyways? Not director Joe Penna, apparently, as he strangles Stowaway with such a slow pace that its climax is a total “that’s it?” kind of moment.
Stowaway isn’t an outright bad film, but it never ascends to anything beyond background noise. The film will hit Netflix this Thursday, April 22.
One Last Thought:
This movie reminded me a lot of another Neftlix production – Away, the Hilary Swank-led series that was released (and quickly canceled) last year. Both fail in their attempts to make a compelling story out of the difficult journey to Mars.
