Stowaway review: Netflix’s airless astronaut drama feels low gravity – CNET [CNET]

The filmmakers behind Stowaway, a new space-based suspense drama on Netflix, make a curious creative choice. The film places a team of astronauts in a life-or-death dilemma that requires them to radio Earth for help, but we never hear voices at mission control. This is presumably meant to build suspense and place the focus on the astronauts, but it also fills the film with disjointed … awkward … pauses.

That’s kind of a symbol for the film’s biggest problem. Perhaps ironically for the story of a spaceship blasting into space on an irrevocably accelerated course, Stowaway struggles to build momentum. More like slow away, am I right?

Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim and Shamier Anderson star as astronauts, scientists and engineers involved in a two-year trip to Mars. But one of them isn’t meant to be aboard — and the ship isn’t designed for an extra person, setting the crew on a collision course with a horrifying decision.

The film opens with the crew blasting off, a scene that goes on long enough to evoke the feeling of real-time space travel. Which means it’s kind of boring. The terse dialogue reveals there’s some kind of problem but with little sense of danger to get the blood pumping. As the opening scene continues, 10 minutes of ponderous maneuvering and impenetrable acronyms becomes 15 minutes of not much happening and not even learning much about the characters.

This sets the tone for Stowaway. It’s subtle. It’s sparse. The camerawork is unhurried. The shots linger. The music glides and tingles. The production design builds a near-present-day spaceship that looks designed to be genuinely functional rather than creepy and cinematic. Even the most exciting moment is a painstaking, near-silent endurance test. The suspense sneaks up on you.

This ain’t Gravity or Event Horizon. Stowaway isn’t a roller coaster ride hurling intrepid astronauts through every hair-raising danger space can throw at them, and nor is it a riot of freakish histrionics as the crew tip over into madness. The danger of the situation invites you to wonder if one of the crew is going to flip out, but probably only because that’s what usually happens in this kind of movie (see Netflix’s recent Voyagers). And Stowaway isn’t that kind of movie.

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