If you’re enjoying the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, the stunningly plausible and dramatically gripping alt-history of America’s space race, then… well, I’m sorry to say that you’ll probably be disappointed by I.S.S. This is an extremely grounded film, never mind that it takes place entirely in orbit, and in which — just like For All Mankind! — the personal is political, and vice versa, and doing a science is a profoundly human endeavor. I.S.S. seems to be set in the recognizable real world of today, so it’s not alt-history, but it’s also not able to capitalize on its intriguing and all-too-imaginable scenario in a way that ultimately satisfies dramatically.
Such a disappointment! I so wanted to love this movie.
I.S.S. starts off great, as newbie astronaut Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) is welcomed aboard the International Space Station by her fellow crewmembers, a mix of Americans and Russians. The cast is all-around terrific, and includes Chris Messina (She Dies Tomorrow, Birds of Prey) and John Gallagher Jr. (Sadie, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) as her fellow USians, with Masha Mashkova (who has also appeared in For All Mankind), Costa Ronin, and the terrific Danish actor Pilou Asbæk (Ghost in the Shell, The Great Wall) as the Russians. Individually and collectively, they are a genuine pleasure to spend time with.
Who knows what really goes on up there, on the real space station, but from down here, the ISS looks like a potent symbol of international cooperation, one removed from the vagaries of geopolitics. That’s reflected here, at first. The scientists all get along like gangbusters, the newcomer instantly part of a tight crew. It’s truly moving, especially considering what is actually happening down on Earth right now between the US (and the rest of the West) and Russia. Foster’s first night on the station includes a little party at which the astronauts and cosmonauts all rock out to the *gulp* now-classic power ballad “Winds of Change” by the German band Scorpions, which still — to the oldster that I now am — echoes with the promise of a new world that the very late 1980s and 90s brought, with Soviet perestroika and glasnost and then the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Megan Leavey, Blackfish) gets it: she’s around my age so will remember “Winds of Change” when it was new, and the hope it represented. She clearly understands, too, the poignancy of how that hope has been lost in recent decades… and the horror of what comes next in this movie, a nightmare that loomed in the past, receded in the 90s, and is rapidly returning: These six scientists witness, from their perch high above, nukes going off all over Earth, and then the resulting firestorms. If anything, Cowperthwaite underplays it, so that we share the initial uncomprehending denial of the spacefarers: surely we cannot be seeing what our brains are telling us we’re definitely seeing…
This is where I.S.S. loses focus. First-time screenwriter Nick Shafir doesn’t know where to take the drama, personal or political, from there. Apolitical nerds forced into a military situation, suddenly reluctantly at war with each other? (Not to spoil too much — avoid the trailer! — but before all communication is lost, the two national groups each get messages from the ground that force them into unequivocal opposition.) It all descends into fisticuffs, punches in zero-g, which is supremely dull and predictable and, well, less than useful in their precarious situation.
This movie is not science fiction — everything that happens here could credibly happen tomorrow. It’s only just barely adjacent to science fiction, with its space setting. (The zero-gravity FX are very convincing; the movie looks amazing.) I.S.S. captures the magic and beauty of its real science in spades: of being in orbit, of seeing the clouds from the other side. Yet it also clearly wants to appropriate the magic and beauty of science fiction — otherwise this story could have almost as easily been set in an earthside facility; at a WHO lab, maybe.
But a key component of good, smart, provocative science fiction is that it thinks more imaginatively about human possibilities, about solutions to longstanding problems, than anything we see here. I wish this movie dared to be more thoughtful and inventive than it is. Options for that are right here! What we get instead is lazy, cowardly, and quickly forgettable.
more films like this:
• Gravity [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Netflix US]
• Europa Report [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US | Kanopy US | Netflix UK]
I find myself more frustrated by a film that’s nearly great than by a film of which I didn’t expect much, and didn’t get much.
Same.
KINDA SPOILERS FROM THE TRAILER
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I saw the trailer before the terrific Godzilla Minus One. And I loved the first half of the trailer for all the reasons you articulated. But I expected it to move into how people in a tin can in space — who can’t survive long without resupply — cope with the blame and the shame of their two cultures having just destroyed the world in front of their eyes, dooming them in the process.
Instead, they bring the war to space. But WHY??? What strategic value could there be in what will soon be a big space coffin? Real people would look at whatever last-ditch orders cane though and say f**k you.
So I’m unsurprised at your review. Shame to waste a good cast and good visual storytelling on such nonsense. I guess that’s why it’s in theaters in January.
Or “OK, we have X hours left before this place is uninhabitable, can we manage to return to Earth without ground support, and if so where do we aim for?” Like Gravity, but with a more reasonable problem setup and actual personal interaction.