DUBAI: Ever since Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” swept the Oscars in 2013, there’s been a rise in so-called ‘hard sci-fi’ movies looking to recapture that sense of gritty survival in the face of insurmountable (not to mention, extra-terrestrial) odds.
Netflix’s “Stowaway” certainly has the right team in place. Brazilian director Joe Penna and his co-writer Ryan Morrison won a lot of admirers with 2018’s “Arctic” a survival thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen as a stranded pilot in the Arctic Circle who just can’t catch a break. Not content with having their protagonists put through the wringer from a survival point of view, in “Stowaway,” Penna and Morrison decide to throw a nasty moral quandary into the mix as well.
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Shalayne Smith Needham: Flix at 48 is up next with our film critic Casey T. Allen. Hi, Casey.
Casey Allen: We re back together.
Shalayne Smith Needham: Yes, we are. And it was a big weekend in Hollywood with the Annual Academy Awards. And we re going to come back to the Oscars in a minute. First, you have a review for us this week. What did you see?
Casey Allen:
Stowaway was released on April 22 and is currently available for streaming on Netflix. Watching this film made me feel like a senior citizen in that it bored me to the point of drowsiness. I also felt like a senior citizen during this film because I kept thinking of the good old days of the past when films were better.
Anna Kendrick in “Stowaway.” (Netflix/TNS)
Published May 04. 2021 7:07AM
Adam Graham, The Detroit News Get the weekly rundown Email Submit
A three-person crew is on a journey bound for Mars when a fourth person is discovered on board. The more the merrier? Not in this case, as there s only enough oxygen on board for three. So either someone needs to hold their breath or an uncomfortable discussion needs to take place.
That s the set-up for Stowaway, which looks like a sci-fi thriller but unfolds like a straightforward moral play. It s a simple numbers game: someone s gotta go. But how do you measure the value of a life under extreme circumstances?
Stowaway (now streaming on Netflix) sees the film-making pair dealing with double the number of characters. Veteran commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), on her third and final space mission, acclaimed biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) and medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) are the official crew of MTS-42, a trio charged with a two-year mission to the red planet many believe will provide the first steps to us being able to call it our second-home. While a slightly underperforming main engine during take off comes close to causing them to abort, it isn’t long before they’re settling into their various tasks. During a brief press conference, Zoe enthuses that this is a rare opportunity “to give her life meaning”, while Marina expresses full confidence that her latest colleagues are well-equipped to handle anything that comes their way.