Stowaway doesn’t smuggle in enough drama to liven up the science.
Netflix’s STOWAWAY is the latest rinse-and-repeat near-future drama offering from Hollywood’s busier-than-ever conveyor belt of astronautical procedurals. While its setting and set-up may feel familiar, even slightly cliché, it does boast an impressive cast and strong performances, especially from Anna Kendrick and the always watchable Toni Collette.
When, shortly after launching from Earth, a 3-person crew bound for Mars discover a fourth person aboard their ship, they’re forced to take desperate measures to find a way to survive and eke out their resources until they reach their destination. Unable to turn back, the crew find themselves confronting a very real version of the classic lifeboat dilemma.
Tracing its lineage back through the likes of THE MARTIAN, GRAVITY, MISSION TO MARS, APOLLO 13 and all the way to Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, STOWAWAY initially presents itself as one of those triumphing over adversity through ingenuity and determination dramas but there’s a bleakly nihilistic undertone to the whole affair, a cruel continual twisting of a knife which knocks down potential solution after solution which at first rachets the dramatic tension higher and higher before straying across into depressing zemblanity as the narrative goes out of its way to pull the rug out from under our increasingly desperate heroes.
STOWAWAY is less interested into the indominatble human spirit than it is in the cold, impassive ruthlessness of mathetics, as calculation after calculation herds our hapless astronauts towards the inevitable, unthinkable conclusions. Toni Collette, as the mission leader, plays the weariness of command superbly, the increasingly morbid weight of the situation weighing her down almost immediately, while Daniel Dae Kim’s dedicated bioengineer struggles to balance compassion with pragmatism in the situation. Shamier Anderson’s role could have been a potentially thankless one as the eponymous extra passenger but he plays it with the right level of conviction and contrition to make the moral dilemma at the heart of the drama far less clear-cut than it might have been. It’s Kendrick, though, who impresses the most, playing against her usual sunnily snarky type and bring real pathos to the role of ship’s medic and sole dissenter to the idea that a sacrifice may be unavoidable.
STOWAWAY goes out of its way to get the science right, as well as the survival equations but in doing so it sacrifices dramatic momentum and those looking for an outer space thriller or a pacey disaster movie might come away disappointed or even a little bored. For fans of scientific verisimilitude there’s a pleasing authenticity underpinning the whole movie to accompany its impressively chilly visuals but what should be a claustrophobic morality drama never quite manages to take off.
In the late seventies/ early eighties, there was a popular urban legend that the increasing frequency of beneficent alien movies (E.T. – THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) were partially funded by the CIA and other US Government agencies in order to soften the populace up for actual alien contact. While that turned out to be untrue, you have to wonder if something similar isn’t going on now as movies like STOWAWAY pick up the burden of educating and informing the general public of the risks, tedium and precarious nature of the impending real-life attempts for human interplanetary travel.

