I.S.S. has a pretty fun and compelling premise. What if the world plunges into a total nuclear war, and the Russian and American astronauts on the International Space Station both receive messages from their respective governments to take control of the station by any means necessary? That’s what writer Nick Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite try to answer in this new original thriller, but the results are sadly a bit underwhelming once it’s all said and done given the potential that the setup offers. So, yeah, unfortunately we have ourselves another typical, kinda mediocre January thriller on our hands.
The story follows Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), a new recruit to work on the station with Christian (John Gallagher Jr.), Gordon (Chris Messina), and their Russian peers, Weronika (Masha Mashkova) – who has a not-so-secret relationship with Gordon, Nicholai (Costa Ronin), and Alexey (Pilou Asbæk). Once the awkward introductory period is over, the film switches gears fast as the following day, they observe nuclear explosions happening on Earth, and Gordon and Nicholai separately recieve messages to take over the station. At the same time, an electromagnetic pulse causes power issues leading to the station making a slow decline in altitude, getting pulled by Earth’s gravity.
It’s a race against the clock for each side to gain the upper hand, but that propulsive energy and urgency just isn’t really felt. The pacing is oddly slow, and there isn’t much sense that the characters are low on time to do what needs to be done. So, the tension is largely deflated by this, with only minor moments having suspense, but it isn’t held together by the film as a whole. While Cowperthwaite has done narrative films before, but her background is in documentaries and the films she has done before are dramas; this is the first thing she’s done that approaches genre territory, so it’s possible that it’s simply not her wheelhouse.
But to be fair to Cowperthwaite, Shafir’s script doesn’t offer much room to explore and experiment. The characterization is flat, it’s in such a rush to get to the conflict that the confusion and ambivalence in everyone involved isn’t felt, and the way things play out feel too easy and clichéd, and don’t really involve anything beyond physical confrontations driven by high emotions. I’d expect something more interesting from a collection of scientists, but hey, maybe the quickness of them following orders and resorting to violence is part of the point.
The performances in I.S.S. are fine, it’s also a competently made production, it looks good, for what I imagine is a fairly modest budget. I just wish it took more interesting and challenging approaches to the storytelling, which could have been possible even while indulging in the genre impulses. I wasn’t having a bad time, but the experience watching it was a fairly passive one, one where I was never fully immersed and invested. It also doesn’t help that the ending lands like a dud, abruptly cutting off as if someone had switched the channel over to something already entering credits. It’s not very satisfying, doesn’t offer much closure, either thematically or story-wise. I just wished I liked this more, I’m a pretty easy mark for space movies, both the cynical and optimistic ones, and I just came out of this feeling very little, which is arguably worse. I’m sure I won’t remember much about this movie after a couple weeks.