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Stowaway strives for hard science fiction realism but ends up a bit of a drag. There are good movies about people floating in space in dire circumstances like The Martian, Gravity, Apollo 13, Ad Astra or even The Midnight Sky but this isn’t one. A decent cast is assembled and the central moral conundrum shows how resource management can be deadly in the vacuum of space. But with not enough satisfying explanation as to how the titular stowaway stowed away, and way too many long silent shots of corridors in a movie that really could have been done and dusted in 90 minutes, this is a missed Mars shot.
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.