I.S.S. is a thriller set on the International Space Station where Russians and Americans are co-operating happily until a nuclear war breaks out down below.
First up, why haven’t more films been set on the ISS? What a golden opportunity. Second up, did you realise (as I didn’t) that missions continue to be flown to the ISS, even though tensions between the USA and Russia are hardly at an all-time low (writing this in March 2024)?
Pushing that tension into the fictional realm, I.S.S. becomes operational as a space thriller when one of the crew notices that massive eruptions are taking place down on planet Earth. Volcanoes, suggests one? It turns out the bright lights are nuclear bombs exploding, lots of them.
At this point happy co-existence between the nations on board ship ceases. Commander Gordon Barratt (Chris Messina) receives a final message from Mission Control before comms are lost: the ISS is now a strategic asset in an attritional war, it says, and his orders are to seize control of the space station by whatever means necessary.
The problem being: the three Russian crew members have probably (though not certainly) had the same order from their base, which means six astronauts who were once fellows in space research are now on either side of a geopolitical divide in space that’s been drawn down on planet Earth.
Rewind a bit. Writer Nick Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite first get us oriented, through the characters of Dr Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) and Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr), the new arrivals who give the screenplay the opportunity to get a lot of information about life on board on a space station out there without it all seeming too explicatory. It’s mostly through Kira’s eyes that this story of cat and mouse in a high-tech tin can will play out.
So, the balloon goes up, as people used to say, or more to the point the astronauts spot from their celestial eyrie that massive detonations are happening down below. The order (or orders) are received, and at pretty much the same time it’s revealed that the orbit of the space station is a little low and that it needs its boosters firing by Mission Control, who are no longer responding.
Two sources of jeopardy is one more than strictly necessary but Shafir’s screenplay deals with the Gravity-inflected one of the space station crashing back to Earth by ignoring it, allowing him to focus on what he’s really interested in: competing loyalties. There’s the camaraderie of the professional astronaut; a personal bond, like the one that exists between American Commander Barrett (Chris Messina) and his secret lover, Russian scientist Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova); and, the wild card, loyalty to country, which presents only as friendly banter until the US and Russia go to war.
Cowperthwaite you might know as the investigative-documentarian-director of Blackfish – about a killer orca in an aquatic theme park – but she’s also earned her stripes as a director of feature films: with Rex, a film based on a true story, as was her next movie, Our Friend. So this is her first film based on what we’re all hoping is not a real-life situation.
Sticking vaguely with the documentary approach Cowperthwaite , or someone higher up the food chain, has decided to shoot everything in what might be termed an enhanced NASA style – cleanly and realistically. Or at least for as long as things aren’t too thrillerish. Then the style lurches from the objective to the subjective. This change of visual gear contradicts suggestions from Shafir’s screenplay, and certainly from Nick Remy Mathews’s urgent score, that we should be looking on this as a thriller from the off.
There are standout moments when Cowperthwaite really gets the bells ringing. In one, a spacewalk, she racks up the tension as Commander Barratt bobbles about in space connected to the space station by little more than a lanyard. In the other, towards the end, John Gallagher Jr comes into his own as suspicions about the endlessly peevish Christian’s true nature come to a head. Call it the Ian Holm moment in Alien, if you like.
There are only six people in this movie – Ariana DeBose, Chris Messina, John Gallagher Jr, Masha Mashkova, Costa Ronin, Pilou Asbæk – and most of them get very little to do. Asbæk’s casting, in particular, is a terrible waste of a really good actor in a role that feels like it wants to go somewhere and then doesn’t.
I forgot to mention the weightless scenes, which means the entire movie. They’re pretty well done – on wires, I’m guessing – though the level of commitment to accuracy wavers. Nor, quite, do the action/reaction dynamic of Newtonian physics always apply. If someone punches someone else in space the punch ought to propel the puncher backwards. It does at one moment, then it doesn’t the next. Sort it out.
It’s kind of emblematic of the whole endeavour – not entirely committed to its premise, yet somehow succeeding, if that’s how you see it (I did, just about) in spite of itself.
I.S.S. – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
