Stowaway (2021)

(Amazon Streaming, November 2022) While I may not like Stowaway’s precipitating plot points and its defeatist conclusion, I am pretty happy to get even a not-so-believable take on The Cold Equations as a crisp movie production. Ably slotted in the footsteps of the hard-SF space films of the previous decade, Stowaway describes what happens when a mission to Mars working with lowest-bidder equipment discovers a stowaway on board. Suddenly, there isn’t as much oxygen or food to go around, and the astronauts can either get creative or die along the way. In the tradition of hard-SF stories that keep shrinking the options available to their characters, much of the film is a slow (far too slow) descent into a foreordained conclusion: Writer-director Joe Penna isn’t interested in triumphant conclusions, so we settle for a long elegy. I’m favourably impressed by the hardness of the film’s science—save from a few special visual effects late in the film, much of it feels realistic even as the script stacks the deck against its characters. (IMDB does list quite a few scientific mistakes, but they reinforce just how much of the story is manipulated by the screenwriters.)  While the cast is a mere handful, it does include Anna Kendrick, Toni Colette and Daniel Dae Kim—with the role of the intruding stowaway appropriately cast with the lesser-known Shamier Anderson. Now, Stowaway is really lazy in how it introduces a stowaway in the (cold) equation—but then again something was needed to get the plot rolling. The conclusion is far too downbeat to endear the film to viewers in the same way as, say, The Martian went for a whole “triumph of the human spirit” thing. Still, I’m rather pleased by Stowaway. It’s clearly not as optimistic as I am (to the point of killing off the optimist in a more-than-symbolic way), but I appreciate any new hard-SF space movie that at least plays the game inherent in the subgenre.