Early in the new thriller I.S.S., the American and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station are looking out the window, admiring the majesty of Earth, when they see what appear to be massive explosions across the planet, at which point they seem to be cut off from communicating with anyone back home. There’s a universe in which this movie then becomes a philosophical exploration of self and our place in the cosmos, as the astronauts never learn what happened and they’re simply left out there, floating.
This is not that movie.
Before long, they do learn what happened, and the six astronauts aboard the station are split into sides and pitted against each other, or at least that’s what their superiors back on the ground would like to see happen. But I admired the movie for what it doesn’t do in this regard—some of the astronauts do, indeed, intend to carry out their nefarious orders, but not all of them do, and the situation becomes a lot messier than it could have been in a movie that cared less about what it was showing us. These people have been living together in close quarters, they’re mostly scientists and not soldiers, and so this doesn’t entirely become a simplistic Americans versus Russians schlockfest.
Which isn’t to say it’s particularly high-minded, or that there isn’t schlock. There’s plenty of that, although I do wish there had maybe been a little more, or that the movie would have picked a side between “super dumb” on the one hand and “complex human drama” on the other. There’s a tension between those approaches that makes the film more muddled than it should have been, as if there were too many people influencing the direction the movie was taking. Whatever the case, the lack of clean lines between the characters does work to its benefit, and we mercifully don’t end up with a ra-ra “let’s all work together” resolution. The world is a lot more complicated than that, and we might not like where it takes us.
I.S.S. is in theaters January 19th.
