Rating: TV-MA
Runtime: 1 hour, 56 minutes
Director: Joe Penna
Quick Impressions:
Though we were considering watching Eddie Izzard and Judi Dench thwart the Nazis, or Benedict Cumberbatch spy on the Russians, we ultimately landed on this Netflix Original space drama because 1) It looked vaguely compelling, and 2) It was free.
If I’m being honest, I didn’t expect much from Stowaway. (I mean, I would have been disappointed if there were no stowaway.) So to a degree, I went in mentally grading on a curve, thinking, “No experience that gives us two hours of Toni Collette could be that bad,” and crossing my fingers that Collette’s character didn’t die in the first five minutes or something. (I like Anna Kendrick and Daniel Dae Kim, too, and Shamier Anderson made an impression on me in Destroyer, but Colette can usually keep the audience engaged even when the rest of the production totally fails her.) For me, the stakes were low. The movie didn’t have to do too much to be good enough for the date night after the Oscars.
But this film turned out to interest me far more than I anticipated. Early on, my husband and I were wondering how long one character had been unconscious. What could cause this person to remain unconscious for the kind of interval we were assuming? Then a dramatic event happened, and I realized, “Oh, so basically this character is like the wounded woman in Arctic.” Once I thought of Arctic, I kept thinking of it, again and again. I pair films in my mind all the time, though.
Then after the movie, I discovered that writer/director Joe Penna also wrote and directed Arctic. (And his collaborator Ryan Morrison served as co-writer and editor on both projects.) I wish I had known that before I watched Stowaway because I loved Arctic. It hung in there to remain one of my Top Ten Movies of 2019 (although I cheated and crammed twelve films onto that list. I explained why in a Top Ten post that Blogger crashed and deleted, inspiring me to move this blog to Word Press.)
If you liked Arctic, (often affectionately known by me as Mads Mikkelsen and the Polar Bear), then you should like Stowaway, too, though Arctic is by far the stronger film of the two. (Apparently, these two stories were meant to be related, and Arctic was originally set on Mars. I’m glad the setting was switched for the sake of the polar bear, one of my favorite characters.)
Penna clearly likes to explore certain themes common to these two projects. I do wish this movie had a slightly different ending, but I find the dilemmas he creates genuinely thought-provoking, and I applaud him for his ability to sustain tension (at times even when the plot seems somewhat improbable).
The Good:
Penna has a knack for building and sustaining tension. For him, (at least, based on these two films), the stakes are always life or death, and he likes to meditate on the salvivic power inherent in the act of saving someone else. In both Arctic and Stowaway, we get the idea that the greatest motivator and the clearest way forward is to focus on saving someone else. Stowaway is more complicated than Arctic, though. (All told, the simplicity of the first film works better, but the progression does make me curious to see the movie Penna cooks up next.) Whatever its failings, Stowaway gets an A+ for dramatic tension.
It also gets points for misdirection. I won’t say that I was completely convinced that it was heading in one direction early on. Though I didn’t know where the movie was going, I was pretty sure that some of our early anxieties were red herrings encouraging us to ask the wrong questions and mistrust the wrong person. That’s where the film most differs from Arctic. This movie simply has more characters to work with, so we get some interpersonal tension and uncertainty about everyone’s motives. That’s largely what makes the early part of the film so engaging.
The set-up opens a lot of possibilities, and while these are still open avenues the story could take, the film remains strong. It’s well acted (especially by Collette who conveys the tension of the situation quite effectively through her body language. Also, she speaks in her own Australian accent. I can’t remember the last time I heard her do that!) For me, the avenue the film does eventually take leads to a place that’s vaguely disappointing. Stowaway opens with the potential to be chilling sci-fi, cozy horror in space, or a more intimate Apollo 13, but eventually it settles into a well-acted ethics problem. I like Zoe’s life philosophy, but I wanted a bigger (and perhaps more logical) finish.
Still, I kept watching the movie, and that’s definitely to its credit because when we started the film, I was thinking about something else and fairly easily distracted. Whatever flaws the story has are almost made up for by the engaging and talented cast. I liked the arresting design of the interior of the ship, too. It looked like a place where exciting things should happen.
Best Action Sequence:
The film’s second half is sure to give you a huge knot in your stomach (provided that you can suspend disbelief sufficiently to engage with it). I don’t want to spoil this movie, so I’ll say that in Arctic, there’s a scene in which Mads Mikkelsen’s character tries to climb a steep hill over and over again while dragging a severely injured woman behind him on a makeshift rescue sled. He climbs and climbs and climbs, but he keeps slipping back, and at one point he outright drops her. Because he’s ultimately unable to drag her up to this more desirable path, in the end (despite his efforts), he’s forced to go a more difficult, less direct way, knowing that he is sure to incur greater peril.
This film also contains a sequence just like this. They’re not encountering a desolate mountain path in the Arctic Circle. They’re on a ship in space. But still, they manage to find a way to climb and climb and climb and climb and climb. The scenes are eerily similar. Penna seems to be a big fan of climbing a lot with the possibility of dropping stuff and having to do something much more perilous as a result. (It’s so funny that I kept thinking of Artic while watching this movie, yet it never occurred to me that the same people made both films. My mind enjoys noticing similarities in works of fiction, so I didn’t realize that these films were so pointedly similar for a reason. The movies also end with almost the exact same type of scenario, except that we’re surely encouraged to draw a markedly different conclusion about what happens at the end of this one. It’s almost like Penna made the same movie twice just to explore all his options.)
Best Scene Visually:
It’s hard not to wish that this film were set in the Arctic, too. I was so impressed by the cinematography in Penna’s first film. It’s basically just Mads Mikkelsen, an unconscious woman, and a polar bear in a vast, snowy landscape. Most of the time, she’s near comatose, and he’s dragging her behind him on a sled. But the film looks amazing, breathtaking.
In this follow up, the cinematography is a bit disappointing by comparison. The two projects have different cinematographers. (Arctic’s is Tómas Örn Tómasson, Stowaway’s, Klemens Becker.) But I think the greater issue is that the views of space from the ship are so disappointing. This seems even more pronounced because the characters appear disproportionately awestruck by them. Anna Kendrick looks like she’s gazing at the face of God, but if you’ve seen Gravity, none of these shots will similarly enrapture you. If only they had stayed inside the ship and quit looking out the windows. Inside the ship, everything looks pretty good.
My two favorite visual moments involve David’s plants. There’s one scene featuring just David, standing by his desperate experiment, (and Kim sells the agony of this moment), then another, cleverly presented, involving David, Zoe, and the commander. I also love Toni Collette’s body language throughout the movie. (That’s not a scene, per say, though there is one scene in which she can’t stop twitching her thumb and wiggling her fingers.)
Best Scene:
David does something that makes me so angry. It’s funny because until he makes this choice, I actually considered him the most reasonable, reliable person on the ship. And I follow his reasoning here. I agree with him to a degree. But I don’t remember David being made commander of the ship. He seems to be acting to spare Zoe (who certainly could not by virtue of her profession be asked to do what has been suggested at this point). But if you’re going to disobey a direct order, you might as well go all the way, David. What he does is not sparing anyone anything. In fact, he introduces the possibility of greater threat to the ship. Since he insists on disobeying a direct order and taking action here, he has one of two choices that would actually make sense. What he does instead is just another method of deflecting and stalling. It doesn’t help anyone. But I do love the scene. Perhaps even more key to the movie’s core message is the one-on-one scene with Michael and Zoe that follows. (I don’t like that scene as much, though.) (There’s nothing wrong with it. I simply prefer the tension of the other scene, so well played by Kim and Anderson.)
Also pretty gripping is the way Collette’s character repeatedly converses with an unseen (and basically unheard) interlocutor on the ground. There are a few moments like this, and she plays them all really well.
The Negatives:
I don’t want to spoil the film’s specific plot points, and I’m not a scientist, but I have this feeling that if I did write in detail about some of these plot points, some readers would cry immediately, “Hey, I am a scientist, and that doesn’t sound quite right to me.”
My husband was put off by the seeming apathy and lack of preparedness of the people on the ground. He thought there should have been more aggressive troubleshooting going on, and at least some solution offered. He said to me repeatedly, “Isn’t this similar to what happened in Apollo 13?”
And all I could think was, “Gary Sinise should have been up there except he was exposed to measles. Isn’t that eerie?” because I don’t think about practical things. I couldn’t remember what part of the ship was broken in Apollo 13.
I personally was excited to see them use what I took for a 3D printer early on to fabricate a cast. Then later, I kept thinking, “Don’t they have a 3D printer? Couldn’t they print other stuff with that? Surely it doesn’t print just casts!” But I don’t know much about 3D printers either, and I don’t know how to build or repair anything.
There’s a lot of stuff going on at the end that just feels wrong. But I don’t know the science well enough to state for a fact that it is wrong. All I can do is make jokes about old Star Trek movies from my childhood.
My biggest complaint is that the ending just doesn’t feel satisfying. I don’t care if the science is right (though I’ll level with you. I think it’s not). I feel that the story should have gone somewhere. The early scenes led me to expect something more. This just seems like a revisiting of Arctic with a different setting and an alternate outcome. (I will apologize for my criticisms of the ending, however, if Penna makes a third film that highlights the relationship between the first two and goes on to make some kind of greater statement.)
And there’s one more thing. I normally focus on what a movie is trying to do and resist the temptation to say, “Here’s what I wish the movie were doing,” because it’s unfair to criticize someone else’s work for failing to be some imagined alternative. But the longer I watched Stowaway, the more frequently and urgently I found myself reflecting, “This doesn’t feel like a story. It feels like a backstory.” I don’t blame Penna’s film for being what it is, but if I were writing it, I would focus on what one of the characters does in the future. So if you were to ask me, “Sarah, what would you cut here?” I’d cut the whole movie. I’d reduce it to a motivating episode in the life of the protagonist of a different film, and I’d withhold it from the audience until a key moment. Granted, Stowaway does not lack for tension and has some conversation-starter dilemmas, but instead of seeing this whole story unfold, I’d prefer to hear it briefly summarized (and first revealed) in a pivotal moment of crisis in a story set later in time. (It would be used sort of like Zoe’s anecdote when she shares that powerful moment with Michael late in the film.) But this is Penna’s film, not mine.
Overall:
Stowaway features engaging characters facing a thought-provoking dilemma. The acting is always good, and the set-up is compelling. If you ever find yourself looking for something to watch while you wait for some important event in your own life with an uncertain start time, this might be just the movie for you. If you turn it off before the ending, it will leave you wanting more. (The problem is, if you actually watch the ending, there’s a risk you might end up wanting less.) I probably wouldn’t choose to watch Stowaway again, but if someone turned it on while I was in the room, I wouldn’t storm off in a huff.