Welcome everyone to my blog. Trust you're all doing great. In today's post I'll be reviewing the movie Stowaway.
So this team goes on a mission headed to Mars, an unintended Stowaway accidentally causes severe damage to the spaceship's life support systems, facing dwindling resources and a potentially fatal outcome. The crew is forced to make an impossible decision.
Now I'm not an astronaut nor do I play one on TV, but when a show opens up with a scene of astronauts launching into space in a rocket or shuttle, their face masks are typically down. You know, just in case there's a lack of oxygen, so they stay pressurized. But that's how Stowaway starts out, masks up with some people shaking in their seats.
The opening makes me have to suppress that realistic voice in my head, so I can watch and see if this is going to be worth my time. So this was pretty hard to get into.
Aside from that opening scene, we meet some characters that don't feel too dynamic. There are odd behaviors for what I'd consider astronauts, especially those going on a long
journey. Daniel Day Kim throws up for motion sickness, Anna Kendrick kind of hops up and down all cheery that they've docked with the station, and Tony Collette is fairly stoic.
We watched them go about some of their routines, and I kind of liked the lack of dialogue when this was happening. We get to experience the quietness and maybe even monotony that the crew is going to live with for two years. The problem, though, with doing this at the outset of the film is that the story doesn't
grab me, and more importantly, the characters don't grab me. This is at the time for me to get invested and feel connected to the characters, but any of their interactions felt very stiff and forced.
And I really like Tony Collette, Anna Kendrick, and Daniel Day Kim.
When I see them on screen, I'm typically thrilled because each can bring different levels of emotion and skill to the story. Here, I think for the most part, they're being underutilized or maybe even restrained, Tony Collette is actually a waste of talent in this.
She spends her time looking like she's going to throw up from stress and sadness, instead of looking like a decisive commander on a space mission that's going to last two years.
Shamir Anderson also stars in this, and I'm not familiar with his work, but he was the standout for me in this movie. He displays a full level of emotion, and in one scene in particular, I could actually
feel as he was going through his feelings.
So the crux of the story is that on the ship that the three astronauts are taking to Mars, there's an unintentional stowaway. This extra body takes up resources and also causes a complication that further just complicates their fate. At about the halfway point in the film is where the story really begins to find its groove.
We were given some conflict intention that had been teased by the soundtrack, and by also some of the characters brooding. Once we reached the middle of the movie is when I began to just really get engaged in what was going on. The story and emotion had finally grabbed hold of me, and I was beginning to become invested
in the narrative. This isn't to say though that what was about to happen wasn't predictable, because
it was. And not necessarily predictable in details, but an overall outcome. And because of how this story is, the predictability, it's a major drawback to the overall film.
There are some very odd one sided conversations as Tony Collette speaks to ground control. We don't hear what they say to her, so it's like watching someone taking a phone call in your living room, while all you hear is the person in front of you answering questions are giving info and making some half-hearted reactions. We're literally missing half of the context, and that doesn't have to be a negative
though. We could rely on the actors to convincingly give us the full context of that conversation
through the reactions, and that just doesn't happen here.
The dialogue is very stiff, and much of the time it feels forced and unnatural. And other times though, it flows really well and feels like something that somebody would
actually say. So I think the unevenness is what bothered me most about the dialogue. The special effects looked really good. I loved the times out in space, and the way they filmed just made it claustrophobic and terrifying and extremely tense. You felt the danger of being out in space. Even if for some reason half the time they weren't tethered to anything. And even though the special effects are good, and there is some tension and anxiety that the story builds, and then even as good as Shameer Anderson was, the film as a whole
just wasn't an enjoyable watch.
So many of the scenes were filled with an emotion that didn't feel even plausible from characters that are supposedly trained astronauts going on this really long mission.
And while I could kind of overlook that if it was the only downfall to the movie, the stiff dialogue and odd character dynamics simply compounded any issues that were already there.
I wanted to like this, and I feel that there is a potential for a very dramatic and engaging story. I'm giving Stowaway 4/10 rating. I'll say it provides some opportunity for real tension and urgency, but a lot of it is squelched by the way that just everything plays out.
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