Remember that cartoon? It might have been a Far Side. It showed a couple of astronauts on the Moon gazing back at the Earth to see nuclear explosions with a caption like, “Now what?”. That’s basically the pitch for this movie.
tvtropes.org, “But What About the Astronauts?” updated 12/17/2023
I got my usual Tuesday movie group together for what was promised to be a bad movie. We debated if it would be as bad as Moon Fall which had set the bar pretty high, er, low, for what a bad movie is. While Moon Fall had an alien living in a hollow moon and the hero flying into space on a museum-prepped Space Shuttle with only two engines because the moon was so close its gravity would help; I.S.S. was less believable.
Having just watched The Newsroom, I was happy to see Chris Messina and John Gallagher Jr. working. Chris Messina once again plays the-guy-you-think-is-bad.
The premise of the movie is that war breaks out on Earth and both sets on ISS occupants are directed to “take control of the ISS… by any means necessary”. So naturally they start killing each other off one by one. There’s some psychological hand waving involving mice attacking each other. But in the end, there’s no explanation for their reversion to stereotype against years of training and work to get chose for this mission.
We add on top of that the fallacy that there is only one Soyuz attached to the ISS which for some reason can only hold two people. We all know very well from watching Big Bang Theory that there’s plenty of room in a Soyuz for three people and a full camera crew.
The movie ends predictably with the girl escaping with the good guy. From an entertainment aspect they were trying to create a sense of claustrophobia and intense drama. They tried to use language for private conversations. At one point the characters were “hiding” in the trash about as effectively as E.T. hid in the closet full of stuffed animals.
If you are expecting beautiful space scenes, you’ll be disappointed as the characters inexplicably close the main observation window early on. Once character even tells the others not to look down. We are left with a one room drama where characters regularly leave the room and get lost. We are left with a movie that ignores how real astronauts would behave or the fact that there are always enough Soyuz for the crew to evacuate. We are left with a movie designed to fill a January time slot because the pitch reminded you of a previous bad space movie that somehow won awards, Gravity.
