“Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many,
outweigh…”
“The
needs of the few.”
“Or
the one.”
These
words, part of the last conversation Spock and James Kirk ever had (or at least
until Spock was resurrected one movie later), reflect one of the many themes
that are explored in Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a film that some still consider the pinnacle of
Star Trek cinema. Weighing the lives of the rest of the crew of the Enterprise against his
own, our favorite half-Vulcan sacrifices himself in the highly radioactive core
of the Enterprise’s
warp drive and saves the day (no, I don’t feel bad for spoiling a nearly
forty-year-old movie). Not satisfied with posing this question to only one
crew, space decides to be a jerk and do the same thing decades later to the
small cast of Netflix’s Stowaway, a
film that has some great dramatic and emotional moments but one that is also
held back by asking the audience to willingly suspend far too much disbelief
(as well as some pacing problems).
I
am pretty sure that it is not a spoiler to say that Stowaway has
a stowaway in it. The plot is straightforward—a three-persons crew on its way
to Mars find make some tough decisions when an unexpected fourth member somehow
finds his way aboard their already-launched ship. How do they keep everyone
alive when the ship has a finite amount of air? Is it worth it to save one life
if it risks the lives of the other three? These are some interesting moral
questions that Stowaway asks
(think the runaway trolley problem but in space), and the dialogue and cast
(which includes Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette) more than sell the drama and
stakes of it all. It is a film that is well-shot, well acted, and offers a few
moments of tension.
The
problem is that to get to these moments, the plot makes some downright
illogical leaps. The mere presence of the titular stowaway is ludicrous if one
stops to think about the “how” for even a second, and I kept thinking that
there was some exciting mystery that was going to unfold… one that would lead
to some clever ah-ha moments that would make his presence on the ship make
sense. This is not the case. The guy is there, and the three astronauts and the
audience just have to accept that so we can get to the tense parts. It is a lot
to swallow and not at all helped by the fact that the shortage of air itself
only makes sense if the people who made the ship were absurdly stupid. Normally
these would be small annoyances, but when the entire plot depends on you
ignoring basic logic you have a problem.
And
then the movie just kind of… ends. We never learn too much about who these
characters are and the lives they had before they went to space, and it feels
like a wasted opportunity. But despite these missteps, Stowaway is still a worthy
time-filler that gets a lot more right than it gets wrong. For a Netflix original
movie, that is a pleasant surprise.
Stowaway is now available
on Netflix.
This review was first published in The Keizertimes on June 4th, 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment