Butler's Cinema Scene

“STOWAWAY” My rating: B- (Netflix)

116 minutes | No MPAA rating

The sci-fi entry “Stowaway” has been so well mounted and incisively acted that it almost convinces itself — and us — that it has something important on its mind.

It’s not until it’s all over that you recognize plot holes big enough to drive a Death Star through.

Director Joe Penna’s space opera centers on a head-scratchingly unlikely occurrence.  In the near future, a three-astronaut flight to Mars is jeopardized with the discovery of a fourth person on board.  This interstellar hitchhiker so stresses the vessel’s life-support system that everyone’s survival is in doubt.

Which raises the uncomfortable question:  Who should die so that at least one or two of the travelers can complete their mission to the Red Planet?

Penna and co-writer Ryan Morrison root their film in a workaday reality.  

The three astronauts (they’re portrayed by Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette and Daniel Dae Kim) exhibit the sort of competent blandness one expects of today’s space explorers (they’re considerably more professional than the wild-man test-pilot types of the early Mercury missions). 

Their ship’s interior feels uncomfortably like a utility tunnel lined with haphazardly with electronic equipment. No stylish futurism here.

And while the astronauts often communicate with their support staff on Earth, we only hear the spacemen’s side of the conversation…they’re wearing headsets and we’re not privy to what the guys back home are saying.

This makes for a slowly building sense of isolation and claustrophobia.

The stowaway of the title is a ground support engineer (Shamier Anderson) who somehow — it’s never explained — got locked behind a panel before launch.  He seems authentically shocked to find himself in space, frets about leaving behind his younger sister (who has a learning disability) — but you’ve got to wonder how such a screwup could have occurred.  Did he deliberately secret himself on board?

It dawns on the three original crew members that short of committing murder (or encouraging suicide) they’re going to have to do something drastic.  They try to boost oxygen production by prematurely launching an experiment involving algae.  A syringe filled with a painless but lethal cocktail is introduced (sort of like Chekhov’s revolver).

And finally there’s the nail-biting piece de resistance, a long sequence in which two of the astronauts make a dangerous EVA in a desperate attempt to recover oxygen from a distant part of the ship accessible only from the exterior. 

All of this is diverting enough to keep our attention. 

But by film’s end we still don’t know how many — if any — of them will survive the journey.  We don’t know if the stowaway was a victim or a perpetrator. 

Yeah, it’s kind of a cheat.

Thank heavens for the players, who find ways to personalize their rather impersonal characters.

| Robert W. Butler