I.S.S. (2024)
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite
In 1979, a few months after moving to San Francisco and just at the point where I was getting tired of being under-employed and wondering whether I would regret the whole thing, I went to the North Point Theater at Fisherman’s Wharf on a beautiful summer afternoon to see a movie.
The North Point, with its 70mm projection, was where big movies of the day were shown, including “Apocalypse Now,” the first ”Star Trek” movie, and “Alien.” I was not a sci-fi fan; I never consumed the kinds of magazines that built up buzz when a new sci-fi movie would approach release. So I had no idea what to expect with “Alien.”
I dug the first hour. But sometime after that, when it became clear that this was actually a horror movie, the kind that kills off all the characters one by one until only one woman remains to defeat the monster, I did something I never did before.
I thought to myself, it’s a beautiful day outside. I’m in the dark cowering during this gross, violent, disgusting monster movie. What the hell am I doing?
And I walked out.
My mood did not improve once I got out into the sunshine. Weary after the sturm und drang of the movie, I sat down heavily on a bench in a nearby park, and was immediately importuned by two Moonies who wanted to invite me to dinner. I must have looked like hell to attract the attention of two cult recruiters.
My first bailout wasn’t the last, either. Each time I feel like a movie is insulting my intelligence, expecting me to care about characters who are just acting stupidly, or representing tired, hackneyed scenes as interesting or fun, I heave a sigh and exit. I’ve been walking out of movies for years. I’ve walked out of comedies, thrillers, action movies, domestic dramas. I’ve walked out of three different Quentin Tarantino movies, at least two Jim Carrey movies, and a few dozen other more forgettable films.
“I.S.S.” is a thriller set on the eponymous space station. I think most people are aware of the real-life trademark bland professionalism of NASA astronauts, that they are trained to be inoffensive and to get along with each other and with anyone else on the ISS. That’s because they spend months in extremely close quarters with each other in a place that smells like farts, trying to stay alive in an environment that could kill them instantly in any number of ways. When another crewmember rubs them the wrong way — which is, of course, inevitable — they each put it aside so that they can continue to depend on each other’s expertise and job performance. The expression of petty feelings, much less passionate emotions or open conflict, are pretty much just not allowed.
This film begins when two fresh astronauts — Kira (Ariana DeBose) and Christian (John Gallagher Jr.) — arrive for a tour of duty, joining three Russians and one America. Their arrival and welcome goes about as you’d expect, except that there’s tension in the air from the beginning. Uncomfortable pauses. Meaningful glances behind others’ backs. So immediately the film feels off, because the viewer knows that it has to be otherwise. Then the next day, nuclear war between the US and Russia breaks out, and everything on the ISS goes to hell just as quickly.
Some would say, well of course you have to have conflict, otherwise there’s no movie. Reader, every movie set on a submarine in wartime starts with the premise that the crew — pent up in a tin can just as surely as the crew on a space station — gets through the ordeal of just day-to-day life through professsionalism and military discipline. Above all, trust in each other. And all of the drama of these films takes place within this context — not a context where everyone is already halfway to going postal.
What happens in “I.S.S.” (man, those periods in the title are annoying) is that when war breaks out between the US and Russia back on Earth, all the feelings of suspicion and annoyance that had already been built up turn into mistrust. The crew becomes two sides of three each, and even without a plot element like “who started the nuclear war?” (no one even asks), they’re pretty much ready to go at it themselves. They were already mistrustful of each other, now it’s outright paranoia. No one says “Stop! We have to unite! It doesn’t matter what happens back on earth, we are one crew. We have to get along.” Instead, one by one they kill each other.
Wouldn’t a better film focus on the thick tension among a crew who are all trying to get along and survive because their countries are at war? And I hate to break it to audiences, but the US and Russia are already fighting a proxy war against each other in Ukraine, and have been for nearly two years. You think the astronauts and cosmonauts on the ISS right now — not to mention the two space agencies whose employees have to work together — aren’t dealing with that, and getting along for the sake of the mission because they absolutely have to?
So this script is preposterous. And I hate movies that expect audiences to go along with stupidity in characters. For example, the character named Christian is shown to be a grossly weak person from the beginning. You can instantly see that he is unreliable (and I’m pretty certain that no such person would ever be allowed in space). So when he turns out to be a huge asshole, there’s no surprise there, thus no tension, no interest in following his character.
This is Ariana DeBose’s biggest role since being featured as Anita in the Stephen Spielberg “West Side Story” (2020), where her skill as a dancer was on display. No doubt it came in handy here, in trying to make trapese work look like weightlessness. (It’s not easy: Steven Strait famously had trouble doing the floaty-arms thing in “The Expanse,” so he invariably crossed his arms.) But in “I.S.S.” her protagonist doesn’t really make sense. She’s supposed to be a former Marine, but shows little strength of character, little professionalism; instead, she wavers between self-effacing New Girl and vulnerable Final Girl. It’s hard to get invested in what happens to her — and there’s no more basic expectation when you buy a ticket to a movie that you’ll care about, or at least be fascinated by, the main character.
That is the kind of movie I walk out of. Nevertheless, now that I’m reviewing movies on the regular, I somehow felt a duty of some kind to stick with it. Sometimes even a stupid movie is salvaged by a movement in the script at the end. No such luck here.
The three Russian characters are a woman (Masha Mashkova) and two brothers (Costa Ronin and Pilou Asbæk). Because the audience is supposed to mistrust them from the start, their characters are underwritten. Nevertheless, the actors manage to convey a wide range of emotions. Consider the options of an actor who can’t use a whole repertoire of body language because they’re never standing or walking. All their physical acting has to come from the chest up — mostly the face, and Ronin and Asbæk elevate their presence in the film beyond what the script contains.
The other decent part of the whole thing is that the weightlessness of space is presented consistently. It’s all trapeze work, and it’s done consistently well by all the actors. So at least they got something out of it — by the end of shooting, their core muscles must have been incredible.