Rather than spend the hour and a half watching I.S.S., you can just watch the trailer in under three minutes and see the entire movie. This is the type of movie in which when you are introduced to the main characters within the first 10 minutes, you know all you need to know about them and what’s going to happen to them.
The movie is set-up as a psychological thriller set at the real-life International Space Station when a nuclear war breaks out on Earth. Three Americans and three Russians are in space when it happens. But if you were expecting something like The Thing focusing on paranoia of who can who, well, you probably get more excitement watching 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000 double-crosses everyone. It’s like the writer Nick Shafir decided to mix that space classic with its less than stellar sequel 2010 where the Americans and Soviet Union find themselves at odds when things happen on Earth. Yep, it’s been decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. They missed that one by about 19 years.
Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBosse) and Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr.) are just docking with the space station at the beginning and they are greeted jovially by fellow American, Commander Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina) and his secret Russian girlfriend, Weronika Vetrox (Masha Mashkova) and Russian brothers, Nicholai Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Alexey Pulov (Philo Abaek). You can tell from the start things are going to go south very quick because that always happens in these movies where everyone seems like they’re in a beer commercial before the fit hits the shan.
And that happens within the first 20 minutes as nuclear explosions happen on other and communications with those on Earth seem to have stopped. That is until Gordon gets a message that Russians have initiated a nuclear attack and to obtain the I.S.S. by any means necessary. Here’s where the movie could’ve really had some promise. Gordon and Weronika have kept their romance a secret until Kira notices them quickly exchanging kisses as he puts on an EVA space suit.
Does someone put their country above their feelings? There’s a comment Kira makes about how the Earth looks as one without borders. On a space station so that six people are having to live and work on, how do you avoid getting in someone’s way? They have to sleep in small compartments in harnesses making sure they don’t float around. You basically don’t have much space to yourself and when you do it’s a claustrophobic compartment. So, who can you trust and who can you not especially since you just met these people days before?
It probably would’ve been better is Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite stretched the nuclear war out a little later in the movie because there’s an hour of people talking behind each other’s backs but never really feeling as suspenseful as it should. Gallagher has appeared in two previous movies with the same concept of wondering who you could trust. The first was the great 10 Cloverfield Lane and the other was the brutally violent disappointing The Belko Experiment.
But the $64,000 question is why would either country really care about a handful of people up in space during a nuclear war? Well, Alexey’s research could cure radiation sickness, which at least gives him some reason for being in the script except for possibly dying or being a killer. I feel Shafir had a great concept but since this movie was independently financed, there wasn’t much encouragement to work more on the script, which was once on the Black List, a yearly list of screenplays that are mostly liked but yet not yet produced.
Something may look good on paper but not translate well to the big screen. The Beaver was once on the Black List. You remember that movie where Mel Gibson goes nuts and finds a beaver hand puppet in the trash and starts communicating with it by doing a Ray Winstone impersonation? Oh, well. These things happen. The movie’s failure at the box office only getting $6.6 million which was less than half of the $13.8 million budget shows that audiences weren’t too thrilled from the trailer. Or they went to go see it on the opening weekend and told their friends and family to avoid it.
Even though it get mostly favorable reviews, audiences were less than generous online as it has a C-minus on CinemaScore and a 5.3 user rating on Imdb.com. It might make for some good background noise, but even for a B-movie, this feels like it should’ve been aborted before take-off.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 