Stowaway Review

Stowaway is the latest film to show the perils and challenges of space travel.

A three-man crew goes on a two-year mission to Mars. The make up of the crew are commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), medical officer Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick), and the ship’s biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim). However, their mission is complicated when the crew discovers an accidental stowaway, Michael (Shamier Anderson) and his presence raise moral and practical issues for the mission.

In recent years space movies have become incredibly popular. Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, and Ad Astra have been critical or commercial successes. Stowaway can stand with these films. Sony was set to release the film before Netflix brought the distribution rights for most territories (the film was released on Amazon Prime in Canada). Netflix acquired a gem of a movie.

Stowaway does require some suspension of disbelief because how could a launch crew miss one of their members being left on a spacecraft and where Marina finds Michael. But when you get past that issue Stowaway is a film that focuses on the moral issue and the characters trying to come up with solutions. The dilemma of the film revolves around carbon dioxide levels were rising and there wasn’t enough oxygen to complete the mission.

Stowaway was directed and co-written by Joe Penna, a musician turned filmmaker. Stowaway was Penna’s second feature-length film and he’s clearly a filmmaker to watch out for. His influences were clear: the film has a small location like Moon and it was a survival/problem-solving story such as Apollo 13 and The Martian. One of the plot points in Stowaway was David having to grow algae to provide oxygen – this reminded me of Mark Watney growing potatoes on Mars in The Martian and when plants were destroyed in 2007’s Sunshine. Stowaway was aiming to show a more realistic portrayal of space travel in the near future, like Ad Astra. But this was coincidental because Stowaway started filming a few months before Ad Astra was released.

The big issue facing the characters was what to do with Michael. The craft only have enough oxygen for three crew members and the dilemma was one of them had to die so the rest could survive, but how could they coldly kill an innocent man? This was where most of the film’s character drama and development comes from. Zoe was the idealist who believed in the sanity of human life whilst David was more hardnosed because he believes Michael was dead weight. Marina was in the middle of this because she wanted to give Michael as much time as possible and she tried to take the psychological burden off the crew so they could function.

All of the film was set in or around the spacecraft. There were no scenes on Earth and the film only showed the crew’s side of conversations. It added to the sense that the crew was alone.

The biggest issue with the film was its pacing. This was problematic during the first act with the film having a feel of being drawn out. The aim was to show the relationship with the characters, show their personalities and their work before they discover Michael. However, these scenes had a cold, distant feel to them. This is an issue that does affect other space films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar and Ad Astra.

Stowaway was made on a budget of $10 million which is low for a sci-fi film: but it looked like it cost a lot more. The film was mostly set in the limited space of the craft, but when the film had to use CGI it looked good. The most impressive set piece was during the third act where two characters have to take part in a perilous spacewalk. It was a sequence that could have fitted in more of the previously mentioned films because of the special effects and the tension that was created.

The reception for Stowaway was mixed. It has a respectable 75% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes but the Rotten Tomatoes audience score and IMDB rating were much lower. This was down to the film being a more thoughtful character drama and sci-fi flick than something filled with big spectacle. It is best to watch Stowaway as a smaller scale drama.