Stowaway is a scifi/thriller about a crew of three's mission to Mars who find an unconscious 'stowaway' after launch and quickly have to grapple with the reality of their limited resources which are unable to support four for the journey.
Toni Collette, the commander, and Daniel Dae Kim, the biologist, are excellently cast and their talent is a pleasure to watch. Kim particularly has a couple nice moments, one where he discourses on jazz, another where he describes his research. Collette is given virtually no depth of character and injects much needed emotion but is let down by the script. Anna Kendrick as the ship's doctor is serviceable but makes the odd choice of this kind of peppy optimism more appropriate to her Pitch Perfect roles than space. Shamier Anderson does well with a difficult role that is burdened with some heavy-handed backstory. But ultimately all the actors are hampered by the central moral conundrum which is the movie's conceit. The hand ringing about what to do takes up so much of the runtime and getting to know and invest in the characters is sacrificed. The issue of course is if we do not care about the characters, if we know virtually nothing about them, their moral dilemma is rendered irrelevant.
The set is cool, the space stuff well done and engaging, a negligible score, and an interesting narrative idea that is fumbled in execution make for something worth having on while folding laundry but not investing in.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
Stream It.
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