“I.S.S.” (2023) stands for the International Space Station, which contains three astronauts and three cosmonauts, a.k.a. Americans and Russians, who are scientists. After they see explosions erupting on Earth and before communication gets disrupted, each group receives messages from their respective governments instructing them to seize the station for their country and keep the communication secret. Everyone begins to distrust each other and wonder if technical problems are the result of sabotage or an effect of the nuclear fallout from below. Will the scientists destroy the long standing spirit of collaboration on the I.S.S. or continue to transcend the terrestrial conflict?
Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) is the newbie, a bioengineer doing experiments on mice. Divorced dad Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr.) accompanies Kira on the rocket to the station. Fellow American Gordon Barrett (talented character actor Chris Messina who gets saddled with a seventies porn stache) is already on the station and gives tips to Kira on how to acclimate to her new environment. Kira notices that Gordon and Russian Weronika Vetrov, nickname Nika (Masha Mashkova, who makes her first English-speaking film debut), are flirtatious. Fellow bioengineer, Russian Alexey Pulov (Danish actor Pilou Asbaek, best known for “Game of Thrones”) is Kira’s workspace neighbor and appears to be the dourest of the group while Nicholai Pulov (Costa Ronin) has more camaraderie with the entire crew.
If you are expecting an all-out battle royal in space, think again. While the premise is solid, and it is already a nightmarish scenario to be required to live at your job, it takes a long time before things heat up. To be fair, I watched a screener so the spectacle of the ultimate office politics in outer space probably loses impact on a smaller scale. On the big screen, seeing someone make repairs in the vast vacuum of darkness probably is more effective at conveying organic tension of the natural danger of working in a naturally inhospitable atmosphere while wondering if one of your roommates is trying to kill you. The underlying tension lies in who will strike first, who will get the upper hand, and will the first blow result in unrestrained chaos that renders them animals abandoning their civilized veneer. Instead, crew members court Kira as if she is the belle of the ball whom everyone is trying to sway to their side. This crew took the slogan “Trust black women” seriously, and it is unclear the reason wy the newest crew member is treasured over others than everyone else has more history, so they know that they do not trust each other. She is the only crew member who does not appear to be freaking out about not being able to find out if her loved ones are alive. It is like watching “Survivor: Space Edition.”
“I.S.S.” feels like a huge swath of scenes were left on the cutting room floor about the characters’ back story and shared histories. For instance, as bloodshed commences, Nika screams at her colleagues alluding about her past and why her loyalties cannot fall along border lines, but that thread remains dangling, and writer Nick Shafir never fills in the blanks, or he did, and his script became Swiss cheese once it left his hands. The dialogue is dominated with deliberations over whether a character is dead or can be saved, and it is duller than dirt. The biggest letdown is that Kira gets built up as crucial, and her character is not that memorable. If it was not for DeBose’s innate charisma, which was on full display in “Hamilton” (2020) and “West Side Story” (2021), the underwritten character would be forgettable. There is a brief prose dump to provide Kira with some backstory, and it provides a nice opportunity for Kira to reveal her sexual orientation, and for her coworker to apologize for making heteronormative assumptions about her life. It feels a little Afterschool Special, but it does explain why Kira is the most objective, dispassionate person onboard. Mashkova stands out because she gets to express raw emotion paired with some dramatic lighting to underscore her descent into frustration and grief at the turn of events.
Casting director Joseph Middleton deserves credit for getting an excellent ensemble cast who deliver organic emotion as if they were truly wrestling with their moral qualms versus official duties. Asbaek and Ronin project the inner battle on their faces as if they do have the lives of others in their hands. When Asbaek nurses sorrowfully on a mylar pouch with a straw sticking out, he somehow remains mournful despite being a grown man sucking on the equivalent of a kid’s oversized, interstellar juice bag. Gallagher apparently has the power to get sweaty at will to show his frayed nerves. It is a waste of effort. With the benefit of hindsight, if moviegoers are familiar with the actors’ earlier work, they will appreciate how Middleton casts the actors in roles that were against type, and how the film hinted who the villain was from the beginning. With more fleshed out characters, it could at least be “Gravity” (2013) meets “12 Angry Men” (1957).
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who is renowned for her disturbing and devastating documentary “Blackfish” (2013), transitioned to features a while ago, but her fictional films have not made as much of a splash. Cowperthwaite alternates between color scenes to surveillance footage to ratchet up the tension as if the viewers were forensic scientists or security officials monitoring the crew for the signs of strain. “I.S.S.” excels at convincingly creating weightless scenes without gravity as if it was shot in space. When the fights start to break out, they are far too few and truncated, but as one crew member begins to stalk the others to kill them and float through the corridor, Cowperthwaite hits some Kubrickian high notes which may remind one of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). One hand to hand battle ends in a still, poetic, mortal embrace that belies the brutalness that preceded it. The image of a third of earth covered in flames set against the sleek, extensive solar array wings gives a taste of how transcendent “I.S.S.” could be with a tighter story. Box office failures like “Sunshine” (2007) handled elevated themes with seamless artistic rigor, and Cowperthwaite never achieves that level of impeccable imagery.
Once the denouement arrives, and the unhinged crewmate is revealed, it leads to a tense, almost verging on hilarious standoff scene, where everyone knows about this person’s shadiness, but are still trying to play it cool so they can get the upper hand before it escalates. If “I.S.S.” had taken itself less seriously as a call to aspire to Gene Roddenberry idealism instead of a campy, paranoid bloodbath, it would be more interesting. More “Event Horizon” (1997) meets “Red Dawn” (1984) please. While it is laudable to urge people to rise above nationalistic pride or baser human instincts like survival or revenge, especially when Russia has once again become the international bad guy, it makes for a boring movie.
“I.S.S.” fails to soar despite having a talented cast, a decent director, and a compelling concept. It is a decent movie to watch at a matinee but will not linger for long in viewers’ imaginations. It is just another January movie.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
Once Gordon gets the first message, it becomes obvious that he is going to take orders and strike the first blow, but Christian is the villain. From the beginning, he complains about his ex-wife. He sleeps with his eyes open. He kills a woman from behind. Some dialogue indicates a potential face-off between Kira, who is a former Marine, and Christian, who was in the Air Force, because those military branches are allegedly rivals. And he is a Christian (get it) from the US, and some of us can be the worst. I went in expecting Asbaek, who always gets cast as a madman, to be the first to strike a blow, but Alexey ends up being a guy who can reach across the aisle and is nice to mice. Plus he is not bad to look at. I was hoping that DeBose would kick ass but everyone gets a turn, and it is very anticlimactic.
