Stowaway (2021) - Shall We Go Further?

 

★★★☆☆

'Stowaway', like the title suggests, centers on an incident where a space mission to Mars is interrupted by a launch engineer hiding onboard, endangering the lives of the original crew of three! If you've seen 'Arctic', Director Joe Penna's previous film about the spirit of sticking around in an extremely harsh environment, you'd probably have a sense already of what 'Stowaway' is going to give. Penna's way of escalating the tension bit by bit to a seemingly dire scenario is as ingenious here, despite flaws like how that engineer is supposed to be stuck up there unconsciously without being noticed at all before the take-off; and his back story told awkwardly afterwards seems too cheap and corny to do any justice anyways!

'Stowaway' is by no means a typical sci-fi flick. By typical I mean there're spectacular scenes involving jaw-dropping action, visually stunning special effects or camerawork like those in 'Gravity', 'Interstellar', 'Ad Astra' and stuff. It's however, not some sort of atypical strange thing that you can't make head nor tail of either. It's telling a straight and plain story that you and I will have no problem to empathize with, of men having to make hard ethical decisions in a life-and-death claustrophobic situation up there in space.

'Stowaway' could be deceiving by starting off like a sci-fi horror or an epic sci-fi adventure, but turns out it's a pretty down-to-earth heartfelt drama with a sci-fi backdrop. There's nothing showy or fancy here technically, but the way it gets set up and played out is rather gripping. And it's never out of its focus, which is, humanity in trials and tribulations. It could be just me over thinking but the film packing a lot of emotions does seem to be able to pep me up by implying that love and selflessness are still the key to allowing us mankind to carry on and go much, much further!