Review: Stowaway Strips a Moral Quandary of White-Knuckle Tension

Joe Penna’s Stowaway centers around the crew of a spaceship dealing with the damage to their life-support systems after discovering an accidental stowaway on board. This would seem to have potential for white-knuckle tension and even heady discussions about whose life has more value, as there’s not enough oxygen for everyone on the Mars-bound vessel to reach their destination alive. But the film hits its dramatic and philosophical ceiling long before the tiresome conclusion has drained the scenario of any interest.

At the start of the film, the Hyperion blasts off on a two-year research trip to Mars. The commander, Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), and medical officer, Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick), only seem to be there as support for scientist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim), whose algae experiments could help the spaceship’s private backers realize their dream of creating “a second home” for humanity on the red planet. All three get along swimmingly, going about their tasks with cool efficiency, light humor, and an optimistic belief in the mission. But their smoothly functioning ecosystem gets disrupted just a few hours into their mission when Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), an engineer who accidentally got stuck on the ship before takeoff, comes crashing out of a hatch, unconscious and bleeding.

Penna and co-screenwriter Morrison seem to see the crux of their story as hinging on two elements. First is the running discussion between Marina and David over whether the latter can reverse-engineer some of his research algae to scrub enough carbon dioxide out of the air to keep the whole crew alive long enough to reach Mars. Second is, failing that, how do they break the news to Michael that, well, he has to go. While there would appear to be an inherent unease in those elements that could sustain a feature-length film, the filmmakers make the unfortunate choice to focus more on the deep-space breathing mechanics than the human element. This proves to be a critical mistake, given how unimaginatively rote that struggle for survival turns out to be, and one that Stowaway doesn’t recover from.

Once Michael gains consciousness on the Hyperion and realizes that he’s rocketing toward Mars, his first thought is of his sister with special needs alone back on Earth. But once he’s convinced that she’s being taken care of, he adjusts to his predicament with shocking ease. This kind of narrative shortcut is emblematic of Stowaway as a whole. Rather than explore richer subject matter—such as the aftermath of having the crew’s careful training and complementary socialization thrown out of whack by an interloper, or the ethical quandary involved when at one point Michael is asked to commit suicide—the film keeps returning to the characters trying to solve the conundrum of their oxygen shortage.

A few scenes communicate a sense of the emotional stakes of that struggle, particularly those that emphasize the delicate fragility of Hyperion in the vast black void of space. But aside from the barely developed flirtation between Zoe and Michael, any kind of character exploration or interplay is jettisoned in favor of setting up predictable roadblocks for the crew to overcome and watch them determine who will be the one to make a heroic sacrifice.

Penna’s emphasizing of the characters’ isolation by keeping everything limited to the confines of the Hyperion (we don’t even hear the voices of those in mission control, only the crew’s responses) has the potential to generate tension, but it only amplifies the story’s limitations. In the end, the interplay between the characters is delivered with little of the intensity one would expect from this kind of survival scenario. And as a result, the film starts to resemble an engineering problem where all the answers are preordained and uninteresting. By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.