Review of Stowaway (2021) by Sinuousgrace — 24 Apr 2021

My wife and I enjoyed this. I don't think the premise was that flawed. Okay, maybe it's a bit implausible that Michael would get stuck inside the bulkhead, but we viewed that along the same lines as when the wrong limb gets amputated, or a cloth is left inside a patient's skull.

But, for example, the algae farm didn't look very impressive on the ship because he had very limited space and resources with which to cultivate it. On Mars this would have turned into a much more expansive (and likely much more successful) experiment. And, I believe they couldn't scrub the mission and head back because they were already traveling at many thousands of miles per hour and had exhausted all of their fuel getting up to that speed and initiating the gravity-simulating pinwheel. The fuel for their return trip was waiting for them on Mars, but there was no slowing down and then accelerating back up to speed to get back to Earth.

Yes, they probably should have had a backup Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly on board. They did have a couple of canister-style assemblies but as mentioned those would not stand up to a 2 year journey. They were on a very tight budget -- this is mentioned several times, when they decide to continue the burn even though the rocket is underperforming (due to Michael's unaccounted for weight), the fact that the capsule was really designed for two but they had pushed it to three, the bit about how they removed some of the shielding layering, etc. I think having a redundant CDRA was seen as extra weight and expense that didn't make bean-counter sense given that these things have a high reliability and usually there's not a man stuck up there who then falls out of the ceiling.

Beyond that, we thought this was a perfect Netflix slow-burn. Not really appropriate for a theater, but we were fairly riveted throughout. We thought the ending was satisfying as well. Not an uplifting film, but one that explores how difficult space travel is actually going to be in real life (my opinion is we probably need to populate Mars with autonomous AI and robots for decades before we send any squishy humans out there, and that shouldn't even happen until we have a very good grasp on how to genetically engineer said squishy humans to be better suited to both the journey and the stay on an alien planet). The idea that "nothing happens" is kind of absurd. Plenty happens. Two more things: 1) we appreciated that for the most part all four of these people acted throughout like MATURE ADULTS. There was little to no infantile Young Adult angst and bickering, and the reactions felt authentic to what trained professional adults would exhibit in this situation. And 2) there wasn't even a trace of Wokeness.