The central tension of I.S.S. is difficult to take seriously in a post-Soviet world. Even with Russia and the United States once again on the diplomatic outs, it is a kind of cartoon the idea of a war and that old jingoism spilling over onto the international space station in the form of murder and sabotage. It is a fundamentally silly premise, no matter how much one characterizes the destruction on earth in apocalyptic terms or makes paltry shows at political commentary. I’ll give I.S.S. this, the geopolitical angle is a new one as far as I know for the space thriller genre. It doesn’t make it any more effective than an Apollo 18 or Life though.
The dominant sympathetic perspective here is of course the Americans, specifically that of innocent I.S.S. newcomer Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) joining the crew of six as a bioengineer. After a short period of adjustment, the astronauts notice frightening flares down on Earth and then receive orders secretly from each of their governments instructing their representatives to take control of the station by any means necessary. Naturally the Russians make the first move and a deadly cat and mouse game develops amongst the surviving space-farers.
The use of a very real and present I.S.S. as a setting is fascinating, tying the movie to a specific relatable context for its broad unrelatable plot. Still, the film makes use of its realistic contours -director Gabriela Cowperthwaite creating a sense of claustrophobia through the highly limited space available to the crew, who additionally have to deal with such things as artificial gravity. The closeness makes the sense of danger and paranoia more immediate, even as it hampers the suspense. But Cowperthwaite doesn’t much utilize that to begin with, even when the film veers into the occasional place of horror. The movie holds back on a lot of the creative potential within this environment for tension. Sleeping cubicles that are never utilized, cabin pressure and gravity variables -there’s only one space-walk on the outside of the station and what becomes of it is greatly underwhelming.
Drama seems to be more of a priority for I.S.S., but it can only muster up incredibly dull drama, such as a relationship between American crew Captain Barrett (Chris Messina) and one of the Russian astronauts Weronika (Maria Mashkova), that is the singular driving force behind their resistance to mutiny. And for being the film’s star player, DeBose is not given much to work with. There’s one small scene to give some troubled history relating to a past relationship but it has no bearing on her personality or actions during the course of the movie. She is largely an empty vessel of a protagonist, while characters around her are slightly more interesting, or at least played as such. John Gallager Jr. as the other American, driven to xenophobic hostility through concern for his children back home is one such example -if the script isn’t in any way invested in examining his motives. Pilou Asbæk as the Russian commander gets to play a little against type and turns out the best performance as a result -contrasted against the frenetic choices of Costa Ronin as his brother and the main antagonizing figure in that crew.
But even with such a menacing guy representing the destabilizing force to peace, there’s very little intensity that comes out of any of the threatening actions. When one character is knocked loose out in space (using the CanadArm as it happens), you can’t help but think back to how viscerally aesthetically terrifying a similar sequence was in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how comparatively boring and unimaginative it is here. No thought is given to creatively using the mechanics of space, except for when someone is stabbed and the blood comes out as little floating droplets -which may be accurate but isn't very visceral. It's already a slow burn of a movie, building suspense very clumsily -except for one halfway tense but also quite silly scene over lunch late in the film. Yet the physical confrontations that inevitably result of these are hardly played with much competence either. The violence is consistently muted, the action restricted -probably due to the film’s unwarranted aspiration to realism.
All through this the movie faintly endeavours towards some kind of dull political comment. A facile observation on xenophobia and cultural mistrust, opining to be directed at the United States as much as Russia but with a very clear bias in its efforts to emulate the atmosphere of Cold War thrillers. It is all truly vacuous as it comes with a sense of smug satisfaction -as though alleging that our inability to trust each other across national boundaries being our doom is a wholly inspired concept. On the contrary and as expressed here, it is painfully basic -with nothing to say in a modern sense about the social-political relations between the two superpowers, or how competing cultural identities beget violence. You’re just supposed to take it that these people will on a fly choose to kill their colleagues simply because their faceless government tells them to. And it’s message on cooperation ultimately, with one on each side morally compromised and reluctant to go through with the objective, could not be more hollow. The movie merely postures at challenging themes of international relationships, when all it really does is recycle trope after Cold War trope.
I.S.S. tries to go for an ambiguous ending -though ‘try’ is a generous term for the minimal effort put in at the script level- as a way around having to come up with something creative for the fate of the Earth. It just comes to a stop instead, and does not have nearly the substance it takes to get away with that. But it is fitting punctuation for a movie that had so little to offer beyond one half-formed idea not given to artists who could make something of it. It is the most typical January movie of the month unfortunately, a bland thriller with no vision almost designed to be forgotten by the following week. Russian, American astronauts, and the I.S.S. deserve better.
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