Rachel Campbell
Multimedia Editor
Stowaway is a 2021 Netflix original rated TV-MA, directed by Joe Penna, that came out Thursday April 22nd. This movie tells the story of Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick), Marina Barnett the Commander (Toni Collette), David Kim (Daniel Dea Kim) on their two-year mission to mars. However, everything goes askew when they find a stowaway, Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson) a Launch Support Engineer and the next thing the crew finds out is they are running out of oxygen when their carbon dioxide scrubber is destroyed.
Michael realizes that they have taken off into space and the crew wonders, how no one from Hyperion, who is operating this mission, notices there was another human being on board, but they are the same group who pushed their limit on the crew numbers and took out one of the protective liners in the ship to begin with, so they don’t seem to be very reliable or professional.
Since it is only about a quarter into the movie by the time all of this happens, it’s hard to predict where or what direction the movie will go. The mission at hand is only finding and retrieving extra oxygen so they can survive. The next road blocks this movie throws at the audience is as it turns out the plan to make oxygen from Michael’s algae samples goes wrong. The remaining air is only suited for two people now, not even three.
So, the end decision is to take a death-defying mission to find a way to create more oxygen so that everyone survives or else two of them will die. However, this conflict is not detailed enough to be stretched over the course of 2 hours like the critically acclaimed thriller Alien (1979): a movie that knows how to properly give just enough detail to draw people in, but not enough that the ending is given away. This is further supported due to the science fiction nature allowing infinite possibilities, which allows the audience to be more intrigued. The realism of Stowaway could push audience views away. Thriller and Si-fi movies are supposed to have a level of uncertainty that shouldn’t allude to the end result halfway through the movie. There needs to be the ambiguity of not knowing even a few outcomes that possibly could happen. This is solidified by the fact that space is uncertain.
I would not recommend this Netflix Original to anyone, other than a teenager. Even though Stowaway is rated TV-MA, it simply does not have the right characteristics for this rating and is better suited to give young-adults something to watch before watching Alien. I would give this a 3 out of 5 stars. There is nothing memorable about this movie other than the passible score. In the end this is another Netflix space-themed movie that got rushed to completion (only 30 days!) with no proper direction or time put into this original film
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