The story of Stowaway is about a three-person crew on a mission to mars faces an impossible choice when an unplanned passenger jeopardizes the lives of everyone on board so we love this story.
Joe Pinna is the director of this film. He was formerly known as mystery guitar man on YouTube. His first venture into filmmaking was “Arctic” starring Mods Mikkelsen. This is his second and of course getting a release via Netflix. That’s pretty cool, love seeing stories like that and he is a very in a way artistic director who likes to take his time to tell his stories.
The story is very character centric, the focus is on the relationship as opposed to the story surrounding them to take that into the sci-fi world. The interesting concept of someone who stows away and because there are now four members of this crew as opposed to three which causes problems because when you plan for a mission like this everything has to go exactly how you calculated it all to go and again all these things coming together create a fascinating intriguing and very different kind of sci-fi film.
We’ve seen varying opinions on this movie and we’ll continue to get those right. You’re going to see some who say “this is moving at a pace that I’m just not all there with”, you’re going to see others who say “we didn’t get enough build up in terms of these characters prior to coming in on this mission”.
Now there’s both good and bad there. We learned what we needed to and learned throughout the movie to appreciate them as characters and honestly that’s kind of true but we wish it’d have had a bit more with that build up, a little bit more with these characters.
Characters
Tony Collette doesn’t have all that much to do. She has her own very specific personality and you learn those character traits as we go. She was probably the one that seem most disappointing in terms of the cast just because we know what Tony Collette can do but that’s not the role she’s playing here.
Then, we have Anna Kendrick and her motivations are laid out in a way you completely understand why she’s doing, what she’s doing and where she’s coming from. We really liked her personality here. Anna Kendrick is a very good actress and to see her in a sci-fi film like this it’s different.
It feels right in a way a big movie of this scale and that was thoroughly enjoyable.
Daniel Day Kim who is outstanding as always and he’s very mission focused as you would expect but the real standout and the unexpected standout for us here is Shamir Anderson who was kind of the wild card. He’s kind of the guy that comes in and everybody says “whoa! what are you doing here pal?
He really is great and he was the one that displayed the most emotion. The range varies from hesitant and unsure to confident. You get to see all of those things, you also get to learn a bit more about him than the other characters. Out of the entire cast, he’s the one that shined the brightest. Pacing is always interesting with a film like this because everyone’s going to have a different mentality going into the sci-fi genre.
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On one part it’s good that the movie took its time, it never rushed into things. There’s not a lot of shouting and franticness going on when they are faced with a decision that they have to make.
Sometimes, it could be a life or death decision. There’s always calmness and most of the time a discussion and that’s somewhat refreshing when going into a sci-fi movie but the other side says well we’re moving towards one very specific goal and sometimes it does take a while to get from point to point and there’s a little bit in between that I’m just sitting back going.
We could have replaced this little span of time with some more character development and it’s understood, we’re developing them in the moment but again we wish we could have hashed them out individually just a bit more. That was probably biggest issue with this film overall.
There’s this revelation and some great emotion from Anna Kendrick’s character. One specific thing that is dragged out over the span of probably 20 to 25 minutes and you’re just kind of sitting and waiting and inevitably something like what happen happens.
It was too anticlimactic for what they were setting up earlier on, in the film and it didn’t feel as much of a payoff as they intended.
You have this kind of attachment to these characters but maybe it needed to be to feel the weight of what we were getting in that third act.
Technical level story
It’s fantastic and the way each shot is framed, the cinematography. It looks really very good. We just don’t know if it had the emotional response that the film wanted us to have personally, that’s not saying we can’t appreciate what we were seeing on screen.
We really did like the restraint show and that’s another thing that we can give director thumbs up on this.
He’s approaching things in a very different way and the general audience is going to respond positive to that so overall everyone’s opinions are going to vary.
The film never evokes the emotional response that it intends stowaway shows restraint and approaches the genre in a different way and that’s at least a good thing.
We’re going to 62 with putlocker score still going fresh because again we can’t appreciate it. We wish there was maybe a little bit more there in terms of the story itself but overall most important thing here is obviously your thoughts.