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| Images courtesy of Bleecker Street |
It’s that time of year with the winter season of January
dumping ground movie releases where studios clear their shelves out of their
junk or otherwise lesser films facing an uncertain future and while most
moviegoers will point to David Ayer’s The Beekeeper as exemplar of
dumping grounders, one I’d like to redirect your attention to is former
activist documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s three-years-in-the-shelving
space horror potboiler I.S.S. or international space station for
short.
An exceedingly simple long form Twilight
Zone episode or unofficial Alien entry, the film concerns a team of
six astronauts (three American and three Russian) living together on the
International Space Station when World War III breaks out between both
respective countries on Earth and both sides are tasked with orders to take the
Space Station by any means necessary. Doesn't get anymore basic than that and judging from the trailers this orbital saga of Earthly warfare carrying over into space isn't going to end well for those involved.
Going from the award-winning takedown of SeaWorld with Blackfish
in 2013 to biographical dramas with Megan Leavey in 2017, the
filmmaker remained busy while facing her first box office failure with the 2021
drama Our Friend. With the 2020
unproduced screenplay for I.S.S. by Nick Shafir kicking around, Cowperthwaite
reunited with Megan Leavey production company LD Entertainment and filming
was completed in 2021 before sitting for another couple of years until ongoing
deteriorating relations with Russia made the project trendy again.
Starring Disney’s Wish actress Ariana
Debose as Dr. Kira Foster the main astronaut leading the picture, she is joined
by Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina) who is having an affair with Russian
astronaut Weronika (Masha Mashkova) while the outbreak of war starts driving
Russian astronaut Nicholai (Costa Ronin) and American astronaut Christian (John
Gallagher Jr.) mad and increasingly violent.
However, there’s a glimmer of hope in Alexey Pulov (Danish actor Pilou
Asbæk) who isn’t ready to forfeit his morals over a conflict he didn’t choose.
Posited somewhere between Peter Hyams’ 2010: The Year We
Make Contact with its hasty Russo-Anglo Saxon relations and the low budget
cheap thrill shoddiness of Gonzalo López-Gallego’s Apollo 18, I.S.S. has
the soft audiovisual patina of being thrown together. While boasting decent, occasionally warped
focus reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine or more recently Yorgos
Lanthimos’ Dogtooth with curved lenses that distort the sides of the
frame or the center during camera movement, lensed handsomely by Hotel
Mumbai cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews, there’s an overwhelming sense
this shockingly $20 million movie could’ve done just as well if not better on
streaming platforms. The soundtrack by
Anne Nikitin is nothing special and like the overall film itself becomes
forgettable if not a little bland.
Ariana DeBose is mostly fine in the picture though there’s
nothing in the piece demanding hard capital A acting from her. Chris Messina from Greenberg as fellow
astronaut madly in love with Russian astronaut Masha Mashkova does a decent job
as a conflicted character while John Gallagher Jr. and Costa Ronin are tasked
with dialing up the crazy murderousness.
The film’s strongest actor seems to be Pilou Asbæk from Game of
Thrones who of the cast members has the most screen presence and charisma,
playing a mercurial character whom we’re initially unsure of who becomes a
formidable ally.
Familiar material we’ve seen done before far better,
watching this in a movie theater I felt my thoughts drifting in and out of Interstellar,
Solaris, Event Horizon, High Life or any number of space
horror thrillers that honestly managed to make themselves known without going
in one ear and out the other. A movie
that at times makes ridiculous concessions including an astronaut locked
outside the ship who miraculously reappears on the ship out of his suit, it has
decent performances and mostly works as a halfway passable pressure cooker of
claustrophobia and fear of heights. Otherwise,
fans of this kind of movie are inclined to wait for it to hit streaming
services at home rather than brave the cold for mediocrity. Probably the hardest thing to believe about
it is that it was made by someone who really made us care about whales and
aquatic animals for a little while.
--Andrew Kotwicki
