I.S.S.
2024
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Written by Nick Shafir
Amongst the numerous movies from 2024 I was planning on catching up with here in the late winter, after missing them in theaters for whatever reason (laziness, shiftlessness, lethargy, sloth), I.S.S. (yes, the unaccountable periods in the initialism forming the name are very annoying) was one of the ones I was most enthusiastic about. Nick Shafir had gotten his script onto the Black List of cool-sounding unproduced screenplays some years ago, and, by God, it was a killer hook: one day, the United States and Russia go to war—and that war extends into the heavens, to their respective contingents aboard the International Space Station, bitter rivals in a struggle to control the thousand cubic meters of air in the celestial void that they once shared, while the world below them burns. Well, enthusiasm only gets you so far, and so, it turns out, does a hook, because a hook was all Sharif's screenplay ultimately had—or that, plus the uncanny sensation you're definitely going to get from a movie released in 2024 yet this totally ignorant of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fairness it isn't the movie's fault that rather than being an allegory or extension of the actual U.S.-Russian conflict, its geopolitics and humanist morality are each stuck in approximately 1992; production was a wrap before February 2022. Still, if you have an absolute need for a movie about gloriously eliminating perfidious cosmonauts from low Earth orbit, I.S.S. will not and is not intended to service that need.
But even by its own standards, it is one astoundingly sloppy thriller; I'm content to lay most of this at Shafir's feet—it's a very bad screenplay, and I wonder how many of the people doing the Black List survey actually read it, or at least assumed that, when they put it on there, it would go through a few more drafts—but there's blame to go around, because regardless of the tottery foundation she was working with, its director maybe had no business taking on the material in the first place. That's almost not fair, though there's a reason that Gabriela Cowperthwaite is by several orders of magnitude most famous for 2013's Blackfish, one of those rare documentaries that actually changed the world, and if that was by virtue of highlighting an obvious injustice (orca captivity at SeaWorld) that could be solved with extremely low levels of social sacrifice (eventually you will no longer be able to see captive orcas at SeaWorld), she did a great thing and let's extend her all the credit possible for that. She has, since then, moved into narrative filmmaking, and prior to I.S.S. she had made fully two features that, even so, had "documentarian moving into narrative filmmaking" written all over them—that kind of low-budget invisible realist drama based on true events that, frankly, I don't believe I knew existed, though I might've heard of Meagan Leavey—and nothing that would obviously prepare one for a literally high-flying, challengingly environmentally-specific, VFX-heavy single-location thriller besides an expressed desire to make a crowd-pleasing popcorn movie. That's awesome, and I wish she'd shown even a modest talent at it: even according most of the film's weaknesses to a script that we can, if we're nice, assume couldn't be rewritten by the time she got to it, she's still magnifying those weaknesses. If everything that could go wrong with a movie's screenplay does, most of what could go wrong with a movie's direction does.
So we begin in the final stage of ascent into LEO, as the acceleration blasts back ISS neophyte Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) alongside more experienced astronaut Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr.), and they shortly arrive at the station, welcomed aboard by the three cosmonauts—brothers Nicholai* Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Alexey Pulov (Pilou Asbaek), plus Weronika** "Nika" Vetrov (Masha Mashkova)—as well as the American astronaut-in-charge already on site, Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina). We amble around as Kira gets a feel for the station and its social dynamics—we're all buds here—and she sets up her experiment (something to do with growing organs in mice in a low-gravity regime), and they show her the big blue marble Earth and then razz her, friendly-like, about the insufficient performative awe she displays. The next day she goes to take another look, and she sees one flash of light, then many flashes of light. Soon thereafter, Gordon has gotten a message: America and Russia are at war, and their orders are to take the ISS by any means necessary. It can be strongly assumed, and it is indeed the case, that the Russians have gotten the same order.
It is not sporting to complain about the movie doing what it has to do to exist, and this is, you know, fine, even if I strongly question whether anybody would bother "securing that vital piece of military infrastructure, the ISS" as part of a war that appears to have largely been finished, or, indeed, if there would be anybody still around to issue such an order. (We eventually get a very spongy explanation, though the movie should've just relied on our generosity.) But I will complain that it did not need this to exist, and both the other avenues open to establishing its "astronauts vs. cosmonauts" conflict just seem so self-evidently superior: it probably would behoove it to make the ISS some minor front in the overall war for space in a conflict that had not reached apocalyptic levels yet (a remaining potential communications hub, maybe, I'm spitballing); but if you want the nuclear war, and I get it if you do, it strikes me as a lot more fun to have watched six people devolve into varying states of grief-stricken, nationalist paranoia, and the drama that would attend that. Especially given the circumstances, it's kind of amazing no one ever just shouts, "so, a hundred million people are dead and our states are almost certainly collapsing, do any of us actually want to follow these orders?", and at least proceed from there as a baseline. (We have a perfectly cromulent driver of any deadly thrills you want to have anyway, right there in script Shafir wrote: the single Soyuz that's the only way down does not fit six.)
Of course, I'm skipping over what are probably more utterly fundamental problems: it can be strongly assumed that each side has orders to begin hostilities, but Kira's entire function in the plot is to refuse to assume that, including past the point one of the Americans has been murdered by the Russians; and I'm still not drilling down to fundamental enough, because that "a hundred million people are dead" line I suggested would be difficult in these circumstances where these people don't really act like that's what they've just witnessed, where global thermonuclear war elicits startlingly little emotional response as its own subject of concern, with the only exception being Christian, who at least occasionally manages to state his desire to get home to see to the fate of his daughters. They don't even really want to linger at the windows. Which is just as well, because this is where "Cowperthwaite is not directing this well, either" comes into play, and given that a critical task of directing this kind of science fiction (or speculative fiction) thriller is communicating exactly what you need from your VFX team, this represents either an unforgiveable breakdown of communication, or Cowperthwaite actually wanted it this way and she's insane; either way, the movie is dedicated to the image of an Earth that's become a planet-spanning sea of flames, like the Cretaceous just ended, sufficient to be a giant offscreen glare whenever we're going EVA (and complete with shots with astronauts silhouetted against what looks more like a blazing star).
Anyway, I'm departing from the screenplay far too quickly, this screenplay that doesn't even see any reason for anyone discuss the Third World War that's apparently just happened, but let's grant that it wants to get down to business, because this 95 minute movie certainly does, though it's tragic that at this point in film history, and with horror and animation maybe excepted, a movie being only 95 minutes long, a number that used to promise an efficient story that simply respected your time, is more of an indication that it barely has any story to tell and will still have to drag itself out to hit the hour and a half mark. That is part of the movie's problem: it doesn't have a lot of business to get to, but still decides to shove important, first-act-style exposition (notably a romance between Gordon and Nika) into a remarkably stupid "character sheet" dialogue exchange in the second act, right after the shit's hit the fan, so we're suddenly, dizzyingly required to reorient our understanding of the situation and only five minutes after that situation has even been established; and after the first setpiece, it just sort of idles, rather than becoming a campaign of moves and counter-moves. Some of this is the way Cowperthwaite is pacing and staging it, though I don't think there's any way to pace and stage the baffling-ass surprise fourth act we get, pinned to the climax for what I can only guess were the most robotically mechanical screenwriting 101 reasons. ("Ah, but you thought it was over just because the film's thematic arc was completely tied off! You're wrong! And here's a confusing twist and this character is psychotically, murderously evil now to prove it.") The movie has not been good till now, but it's at least had good parts; it sends you out sort of revulsed by it.
So I did just say there's good in it, and if it's generally all mixed up with the bad, we can still acknowledge it. There's a lot of work going into this $14 million film's illusion of weightlessness—it's maybe a double-edged sword that we expect this from our quasi-realistic spaceflight movies these days, and the same exact movie made in 1984 (the anti-2010, I guess) that just posited artificial gravity would probably have freed up energy for more crucial things, but hey, it's not nothing. (Now, I am not a giant fan of the way Cowperthwaite obliges the camera to constantly move like it's also weightless, and being operated by someone who didn't like being weightless, as there were subtler, prettier aesthetic choices available—for that matter, I am perplexed by the frequent recourse to intercutting footage from fixed diegetic cameras inside the ISS, as some sort of clumsy attempt at generating paranoid atmosphere for our benefit alone, because whatever these cameras are, they sure never figure into the plot, not one of our six principals ever using them for anything, or even seeming to.be aware of their existence.) But I am swinging back towards the negative, and let's get the major positives out of the way: the score by Anne Nikitin is pretty good, this loud, atonal blare of plaintive synthetic notes that she's not really trying to fit together into "music," and it very frequently works, notably in the film's biggest moment; and that biggest moment is pretty much an unambiguous success, beginning with two belligerent spacefarers unbound by gravity and locked in mortal combat inside a metal tube, and ending with an image that announces itself as the prime reason anyone would have wanted to make this movie (it is the only possible reason the movie has an R rating that, even with this scene, it does not earn, so my one note here is "it should probably be messier"). It's a flattening metaphor for exactly what you'd expect, and still utterly pure in its imagemaking and mordant beauty.
There is also the matter of the performances, and I don't know how much I want to credit the director for them, because they are by no means uniform. In fact, all the best performances are clustered with the Russians—this is as much to say all the good performances, because Messina doesn't have much of a performance to offer the movie thanks to the way it's structured, and Gallagher doesn't have a character amenable to any performance under these circumstances—but Mashkova, Asbaek, and Ronin are all quite good, in that order. Even the worst is doing something useful: Ronin has a weird twitch thing that he's certainly overcooking, but it's in pursuit of a clear design; Asbaek is two seconds away at all times from becoming a pile of whimpering sobs, and may actually be the only actor remaining cognizant that the setting of the film is "the Third World War" even if the script doesn't care about it; and Mashkova, who acquires the most keenly personal concerns the quickest, is actually slightly great, allowing us full access to her ragged emotions and the shifting calculations she's having to make. Mashkova is actually acting too fucking hard, at least for Cowperthwaite to have kept up with: she's making herself cry, and the tear—ha—falls down her face, on the ISS, in low Earth orbit. More's the pity she's usually acting against DeBose, who is incredibly bad, taking a character who is already poorly written, with a naivete that's hard to square with her backstory (a Ph.D.-holding ex-Marine), and playing Kira with basically no indication of any dynamic within that character, such as might lift her out of the idiot she seems like, and of an American-side cast that I think the film wants you to interpret as trying to compartmentalize the existential horror of it all—and who are all failing to make it seem like they need to compartmentalize anything, to varying degrees—DeBose is the one who most seems to genuinely not be aware of what all those fireballs imply.
That Kira is our designated heroine is our burden, too, since it means the thrills in this thriller arise lumpily, mostly as a result of other people doing things around her—I'd call her "reactive," but that still has the word "active" in it and you'd get the wrong idea—and Cowperthwaite is having a devil of a time trying to figure out how to keep this going past first blood, and to do plots and schemes inside a metal enclosure barely twice the size of my house. She's apparently hoping you'll misapprehend the ISS as something more like the size of a cavernous Gothic mansion instead, so that she can lose track of characters and entire factions for ten minute chunks at a time, like they've gone into stasis or they're taking turns out of fairness. There's a long conversation between Kira and Christian inside Kira's sleeping pod—a three or four-minute realtime scene—and you will be compelled to ask, "so what are the Russians doing right now, since they've already shown their hand, and this is probably the first place they'd look?" It's pretty much this slack the entire time, and "slack" simply is not the adjective you should ever have slapped onto your space thriller, theoretically tapping into the august tradition of some enormously great films, like Gravity and Apollo 13 or, even on the lower end of the budgetary spectrum, something like Europa Report (good grief, Apollo 18); it has its moments, but those moments are not worth it.
Score: 5/10
*Sic.
**Sic.
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