A mission to Mars is threatened by the presence of a stowaway…

Back in 1996, still shimmering with a near superstar glow from her rom-com triumphs in When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan decided to test her acting chops by taking on the role of a heroic Gulf War Helicopter Captain in the worthy (but dull) war movie, Courage Under Fire. It was not a good career move, almost universally regarded as one of the worst casting ‘fails’ in recent cinema.

Spool forward to 2021 and Anna Kendrick’s woeful attempt to portray a Mars bound astronaut in this week’s Netflix sci-fi release, Stowaway is giving Meg a run for her money. Ouch. If the normally likeable Kendrick is an astronaut then I’m a good fit for the Greta Thunberg biopic. Anna plays space medic Zoe Levenson with the hard headed maturity of someone heading for their first college sorority party – complete with copious make-up, and retina searing teeth – a strange look for someone at take-off. When the launch vehicle starts to shudder, Kendrick’s character looks alarmed – like someone who just shouldn’t be there. Is she by any chance the eponymous Stowaway?

In the adjacent seat, is the amazing Toni Collette, playing her commanding officer, the comically named Marina Barnett. Toni has opted for no make-up at all, and something of a Linda (Terminator) Hamilton no-nonsense Aussie tough woman persona. Collette has clearly made the unilateral decision that she is not going to be in the same film as Kendrick. It’s as if the two women are operating in parallel but otherwise unconnected universes. This viewer sensed that Toni was hoping that if could act the awful dialogue with enough conviction, perhaps no one would notice quite how bad this film was… that it would stay afloat (or in orbit) by the sheer weight (or buoyancy) of her acting. Sadly, the harder Collette pushes the lines, the more she comes over as a sort of Meg Richardson in space.

I appreciate younger SFB readers may have no idea what I’m talking about. Just enter ‘Crossroads, Meg Richardson, Noele Gordon’ into Google or YouTube, and you’ll get a taste of the pain we endured watching television in the 1970s.

So, if Toni and Anna aren’t the Stowaways, what about Daniel Dae Kim (Jin-Soo Kwon from Lost) in the third seat? Daniel is supposed to be some kind of space biologist but – and this may be a spoiler, however it needs to be said – the research project he claims to have been working on for three years is… is… growing cress. Yes, cress, in little plastic pots like you get at the supermarket. Cress – ! – like we used to grow at school (also in the 1970s although I never really understood why). The cress gives off AN IMPORTANT LOOKING GREEN LIQUID which Daniel siphons off with A VERY BIG SYRINGE – whilst making lengthy speeches about John Coltrane and Charlie Parker (no, me neither) – and pours into cut-up plastic weed-killer containers which might just have been picked up by the prop buyer as a job lot from B&Q. The IMPORTANT GREEN LIQUID then turns a sort of TOILET BROWN – which means that the IMPORTANT EXPERIMENT has FAILED!

Ok, ok, you want to know about the Stowaway? He’s hiding in some kind of air conditioning unit (this is the premise of the movie, so not a spoiler), although he’s pretty vague about how he got there, and Toni and her crew seem strangely lacking in curiosity as to why. I reassured my wife: ‘There’ll be a twist! There’ll be a twist!’

Spoiler alert.

There is no twist.

Michael the Stowaway (Shamier Anderson) is quite a dull bloke, and he stays dull for the rest of the film.

So what about the Second Act Complication? This is in the trailer (so I’m claiming spoiler exemption here), but about forty minutes into the movie, the crew – who are collectively several stages short of a Saturn V launch rocket – realise that with an extra person on board their life support resources will run out before they get to Mars.

Really? No shit?

Cue a rather dull riff on the classic balloon game followed by a lengthy, and not very exciting space-walk where more oxygen has to be obtained from A DIFFICULT PLACE. Remember how Sandra Bullock rocked a thrilling space-walk in Gravity? Well, now try to imagine the opposite, and then make it duller than the dullest lockdown day you’ve endured over the last year.

You may have gathered that I didn’t admire this film. Nothing about it makes sense. The dialogue is appalling. The characterisations – despite the presence of the formidable Toni Collette – are zero dimensional, if that’s even a thing. The story never really gets past its second act. On the plus side the CGI is passable, and the interior set design almost plausible, if logistically confusing. This is a truly terrible film – so bad it makes George Clooney’s recent sci-fi turkey, Midnight Sky look like Blade Runner.

To be fair it’s perhaps unkind to blame any of the participants, rather I gawp that anyone at a respectable production company read this script and thought it worth a dollar, pound or euro of anyone’s cash to commit it to digital celluloid, or that Netflix thought it worthy of their platform.

This is what my wife calls a ‘Don’t Pause It’ movie, as in, ‘I’m going to the loo and putting the kettle on. Don’t pause it.’  1/10

Martín Jameson