My wife reads my reviews before they’re published. Sometimes she cleans up grammatical errors, and other times it’s to tell me she thinks I’m off-base and should change a hot take I have on a film. Usually I don’t. One of her beefs with my reviews is when I mention how a film reminded me of a previous movie. She thinks I’m doing that to imply the filmmakers stole their idea or aren’t being totally original. Well, this movie is an example of where I am going to do that, but not to imply anything wrong with what the filmmakers did. This was a suspenseful sci-fi thriller that reminded me of “Crimson Tide” (Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman), because when that submarine lost communication, they thought they were supposed to eliminate the Russians, and half the crew didn’t want to. A mutiny took place. The premise of this story is that American and Russian astronauts are on the International Space Station. A new scientist, Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose from West Side Story), joins them to do some experiments with medicine on mice. They all get along swimmingly (and it looks like they’re swimming as they go from area to area on the space station). They’re giving gifts to one another (mostly booze from their homeland), and it’s all smiles.
There’s a scene that was done brilliantly. The astronauts are marveling at the view from Earth from outer space, but Dr. Foster sees some explosions. Very soon, there were lots of explosions. The Earth goes from a big blue marble, to a lot of reddish yellow, with clouds of smoke. We heard in an earlier conversation that there are tensions between Russia and the U.S. Now a message comes through to the U.S. astronauts, telling them they have to secure the space station by any means necessary. It’s a safe assumption the Russkies got a similar message and now the paranoia sets in (sorry Honey, but this reminded me of “The Thing”). I immediately thought that the best thing for them to do was tell each other about the messages they got, and explain how it would be impossible to take over the ship and wouldn’t make sense for us to damage the ship while trying to kill each other, so…let’s just worry about getting this space station back home as planned, and we’ll worry about what our governments are doing at that time. Of course, then you wouldn’t have a 90 minute movie (which was the perfect length for this B-movie).
The story does a good job setting you on edge, wondering how each person will handle the circumstance they’re thrust into. The fact that Russian scientist Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova) is in love with the American scientist Gordon (Chris Messina), is interesting. And, he’s just been told he has to go out and fix an antenna (everyone will wonder if the Russians are going to go all HAL on his ass while he’s out there).
They do a great job keeping us guessing about who we should trust. They just needed a bit more time developing the characters. It would have certainly ratcheted up the tension when things started going south. Yet I’ll be the first to admit that, if they did, and this were a two and a half hour movie, I’d be complaining about that.Â
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite did a good job with what she had, as there was enough suspense to make it an enjoyable ride. My wife and I did want a bit more with the ending, though.Â
This is a movie everyone will enjoy. 3 stars out of 5.