Back in 2021, William Shatner became one of the few lucky people—and the oldest—to travel into space aboard the Blue Origin craft backed by Jeff Bezos. When he was interviewed after landing back on Earth, most folks expected a soaring soliloquy about the majesty of space. What they got, though, were the words of a man who had seen Earth as it truly is: a tiny, fragile homestead in the middle of an impossibly vast, profoundly empty, uncaring universe, and the fact of it being in perpetual, avoidable danger made him mourn.
It’s actually not an uncommon reaction for astronauts, to the point that there’s a psychological term for it: the Overview Effect. It is, though, something you rarely see explored with the full existential horror that it deserves. That is, until now, in I.S.S.’s most terrifying moment, where the American and Russian crew members of the International Space Station look down at Earth and see its blue surface bursting into nuclear flames like unholy boils on the face of God.
It’s a moment so primally frightening that even though Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s confident, eerie direction imbues Nick Shafir’s tense script with the weight it deserves, there’s little that follows that lives up to it. It’s not for lack of trying: The next scene, in particular, where both the American and Russian captains receive their sole communication from suddenly silent superiors to take control of the space station “by any means necessary,” is blood-chilling in its own way.
What comes after that is a good hour of six characters—three Russian, three American—trying to act on the insufficient information they do have (think of it as an inverted Crimson Tide scenario). At only 90 minutes total, however, I.S.S. is in such a rush to get to the bloodshed, deception, and panic that most of the fertile ground of this premise goes unexplored.
A scenario where home may or may not exist, what responsibilities and fealty the astronauts hold, and what priorities these people hold under duress gets sorted out with pretty cutthroat efficiency. Cowperthwaite’s film is only willing to give voice to the politics and history informing the drama in spare, rapid-fire moments of suspense. The closest we get to even acknowledging the fraught history and grim fate of these two nations fulfilling their nuclear prophecy lies in a single element: the truth behind the Russians’ specific science project.
The end result is a film that succeeds at being an anxious chess game of competing interests often ending in violence. It’s still thrilling for what it is, and the cast injects humanity into even their characters’ most inhumane moments. But I.S.S., like its characters, is absolutely ravenous for something beyond the need for suspense to tether us in the Cold War-flavored nausea of that moment. Instead, all too quickly, it devolves into a depiction of a ship full of people far too willing to follow orders, which is, likely, why the missiles started flying in the first place.
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You do realise the “ISS” is a hoax and isnt real…this movie was released right now at the same time as the hoax “Artemis Moon landing” was delayed for another 3 years, to keep space fanboys happy and blur their discernment between scifi and real life.
This film is not real? I’ll need some evidence for that.