Stowaway: Some of it is good, some is meh.

Movie Review: Stowaway (2021) on Netflix

Mixed bag to report on Stowaway. Some of this film is good. Some of it is meh.

Commander Marina, doctor Zoe, and scientist David are on their way to Mars. They're bringing along a biology experiment to filter carbon dioxide through plant life for later use when they arrive on Mars. Almost immediately, they discover a problem: blood droplets dripping from a ceiling panel of their newly launched ship. Opening the panel, a body drops down, one unconscious launch technician Michael Adams, who was unaccounted for 12 hours earlier because he was securing a part and knocked out during launch. Now he's committed to the mission with no way to return to Earth. And his bloody wound has shorted out the ship's one working carbon-dioxide filtering system. The backup emergency filter won't last the trip. What's a crew to do? 

The major conflict that will become apparent later in the film is that the company running the mission, Hyperion, had cut corners to ramp up the mission. The ship was planned for a crew of two and they stretched plans to fit a third on the assumption nothing would go wrong. Now that the carbon filtering system is waning, adding a fourth person threatens the lives of everyone. The longer the flight goes on, the worse things get. The original three keep the news from Adams, deciding they and Hyperion have 20 days before something drastic must be done and give themselves 10 days to find a solution before telling Adams and somehow killing him. They waste no energy on science on this film, it's all about the emotions of making the decision of who lives and who dies, and struggling to make the right decision.

Here's the rub: They don't do a very good job of explaining things to the audience. So, at first you don't know this ship is on its way to Mars rather than setting up on a space station. They also don't explain why the ship is spinning around a central axis, using centripetal force to create artificial gravity--there could be many logical reasons to do this but they don't give any; my suspicion is it provides logic for blood to dribble from the ceiling to the floor. Also, the gravity builds drama as the crew must use a tool to climb out of the artificial gravity well at each end of the axis to retrieve something, and the extremely long axis helps them make the movie longer. I suppose that's cynical of me, but that's all I can come up with. There are other things, too, but these are chief among them. I think this would have been much more interesting if Adams had been an evil guy sabotaging the mission and we'd spent the movie trying to figure that out. Didn't go there.

As I said, some of the film is good. There are decent effects. The cast is decent (Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim, Anna Kendrick, Shamier Anderson). And the mock-up spacecraft is great--this seems where they spent most of their money on this film! 

Stowaway was supposedly Netflix's top pick over its first weekend. There were a lot of viewing choices and possibly there were better ones. I'd rate Stowaway B for Better Luck Next Time.