Image Credit: Bleecker Street
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, where I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Ariana DeBose is lost in space. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite and Threads/Instagram: @jammerwhite
Given my long-established credentials as a space nerd, I was naturally excited to see a new dramatic thriller that had the International Space Station as a setting. Yet ISS didn’t completely live up to my expectations.
Starring Ariana DeBose, Chris Messina, John Gallagher Jr., Masha Mashkova, Costa Ronin and Pilou Asbæk, ISS chronicles what happens when tensions flare in the near future aboard the International Space Station as a worldwide conflict breaks out on Earth. Reeling from this, the astronauts receive orders from the ground: take control of the station by any means necessary.
It all sounds a little like 2010: The Year We Made Contact (minus monoliths and Roy Schneider in his house with dolphins), but director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and writer Nick Shafir are looking to craft much more claustrophobic tension on board the station, albeit with the stakes still globally high. Where does humanity end and service to country begin? How would trained astronauts –– people who have an orbital view of our planet and seek to place themselves above such petty issues as borders or governments –– respond when pressed into action by those very concepts.
There was rich source material here, and while the film initially explores it in compelling fashion, once it becomes a pulpier, more melodramatic thriller, it feels like the brain heads out of the airlock and the need for ridiculous turns derails all the tension that has been slowly building.
DeBose, Messina and the rest do what they can with the material, but it becomes increasingly stretched to breaking point. A real shame, as there was the potential here for something great, but it misses the mark like a rocket failing to dock properly.
ISS is in US cinemas now. There is no word yet on a UK release date.