Mark Reviews Movies: STOWAWAY (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 22, 2021

Until the third act, Stowaway takes its time, establishing the goals and routines of a mission to Mars, the basic personalities of the ship's crew, and one significant and unexpected hurdle to the potential success of the mission. That's when the real problems—involving an impossible moral choice based on some pragmatic and tragic math—begin.

Co-writer/director Joe Penna shows some real patience with this film, which forgoes any expectations that this story might just be an excuse for visual effects and action. It's set, of course, on a spaceship, rotating to dizzying effect on a voyage to Mars, but almost the entirety of the film takes place inside the cramped confines and sterile quarters of the vessel. We don't get multiple external shots of the ship, because Penna wants us to feel how enclosed and isolated this mission, which will take two years to reach Mars and return back to Earth, actually is.

As one should guess from the title, there is a stowaway aboard the craft, but instead of turning that character into some kind of antagonist or the direct source of conflict, he's perfectly innocent. Indeed, he's even more terrified of being aboard than the crew should have reason to fear him.

It's fascinating to watch this film within the context of so many stories about adventures in space travel. There's no hidden villain, trying to use this mission for some ulterior motive. There are no aliens. Until the climax, there's no real threat from the nature of space itself—no meteors or asteroids or anything that could cause catastrophic failure to the ship.

Penna and co-screenwriter Ryan Morrison have simply crafted a human drama, which just happens to take place on a spaceship, dealing with what amounts to one of the fundamental questions of morality. Is one person's life worth the lives of others? From that question, there are a few more: How does one live, knowing they must die to ensure the survival of other people, and how can a person live with the consequences of one person's death, in order to save his or her own?

The story begins with a sequence that asserts the filmmakers' intentions to keep this focused on the characters. We watch the takeoff of the ship, shot entirely from within the cockpit of the rocket being launched into space and looking only at the faces of these characters as they react to that.

Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) is the ship's doctor, who's initially startled by the bumpy ride but breaks out with a big smile as she soars into the sky. David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) has been tasked with trying to start plant growth on Mars, and he doesn't take the liftoff so well. The ship's commander is Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), who has been on two previous space missions, with this one serving as a her final voyage. She's calm and focused, even when an issue arises with the higher amount of fuel the ship is burning on takeoff.

After connecting with a device that will spin the ship and create artificial gravity, the three settle into their roles and routines. Shortly into the trip, the ship's carbon dioxide scrubber has fails, and within a panel in the ceiling, Marina discovers Michael Adams (Shmier Anderson), an engineer whose job should have been finished before takeoff, trapped inside. He's unconscious at the time, but when he awakens, it's with the terror of realizing he's trapped in this ship for two years, with a younger sister who needs his help on Earth.

The now-quartet starts to bond. Marina appreciates the stowaway's willingness to work. Michael helps David with his experiments. Zoe starts talking to Michael about his life, his tragic past, and his dreams of becoming an astronaut. It's simple stuff, but that's all we need to understand the fundamental qualities of these characters.

There's a big problem, though. Because of the damage to the scrubber, there isn't enough oxygen for all four people aboard. The answer is one of basic, awful math: Three can survive, so mission control suggests the crew simply subtracts one member of the crew. Since the original three are vital to the ship's arrival on Mars and return home, there's a very specific one who needs to be subtracted.

The film digs into this quandary, not only as a moral question, but also as one that takes a significant toll on each of these characters in distinct ways. The kind-hearted Zoe desperately wants to find a way to save Michael. The pragmatic Marina knows there is no solution but also knows the mission can't succeed if her crew is racked with guilt. David offers Michael his own choice, because he knows what needs to be done but can't bear to do it himself. Michael has to confront the apparent immediacy of his mortality.

Penna and Morrison don't give these characters any more development than they need for this particular tale, and that's the right approach here. It allows the questions and the horrible sense of inevitability, set within the claustrophobic spaces of this ship, to simmer. The actors play it with a strong understanding of their respective character types and complete, quiet sincerity. There isn't much more than we can ask from or of this story.

The tale stumbles, perhaps, with its climax, which sends a couple of characters for a spacewalk on a last-ditch mission to save everyone. The extended sequence is effective, to be sure, even if it does reduce the real conundrum to a potentially simple solution. Stowaway may evade the inevitable by the story's resolution, but that doesn't mean it avoids some difficult choices, made by characters with whom we've come to sympathize. We can't ask for much more than that, either.

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