Stowaway (2021)

Somehow an engineer ends up as a unintentional stowaway on a spaceship heading to Mars. How he ends up behind panels screwed in place is anyone's guess (he certainly didn't screw himself in), and not an issue that i remember being answered. Whatever.

At the core of Stowaway is old 'trolley problem': would you sacrifice fewer people to save more? With an extra body on board and a mechanical failure that means oxygen can't be replenished, there are now four bodies using up resources rather than 3. This is something we've seen a gazillion times before in movies, usually as a minor bump in proceedings before carrying on to overcome something with even more at stake. Here, it's the whole premise, which is unfortunate for something that was dealt with in 5 minutes in The Good Place.

The main problem is that the noble idea of sacrifice for the greater good has no dramatic weight unless the characters involved are likeable. Toni Collette is well on the road to becoming a national treasure, it's almost impossible not to like her. Unfortunately, everyone else is expendable. Daniel Dae Kim is upset about his plants, which...meh. Shamier Anderson, the accidental stowaway, is injured and has a sister back on earth he's the guardian of which means meh. Anna Kendrick's soul is pure meh.

Between the plants and the oxygen and the go outside and fix the thingy bit, what we have is the middle bit of Danny Boyle's 'Sunshine' with a made for TV script and no budget for character development.

Meh.

Fmovies: Stop raising the price of people's subscription to keep churning out this utter garbage all the time! The cast literally means NOTHING without a decent well written story & this was just a predictable snooze fest!

Excellent and plausible buildup to a suspenseful nothing. Plot holes galore didn't prepare us for the monumentally abrupt ending. Despite the lack of character development the movie was working well. But the lack of dialogue regarding their predicament only compounded the fact that the tale was lost from the get-go. Some lovely scenes, competent acting, elegant special effects. But at some point, the producers rang on the red phone to say that the party was over. Very disappointing.

Stowaway fmovies. Well, it had actors. And it had dialog. And there was a plot. So I guess it was a movie. Nothing overtly bad about this movie. But nothing really great either. Just a movie about a problem in space and a plot that crawls along, with no real twists (except predictable ones), no great dialog, no great acting. Just a movie about some stuff that happens. OK to watch if you want to pass the time. Just don't expect a lot.