I.S.S. (2024)

User Review

• 

  d_riptide

  5 / 10

  Many movies involving outer space may have different plots and objectives but they mostly all stem back to a sense of self-discovery or, if not exploring aliens from other worlds, then the monsters of distrust within ourselves. “I.S.S” REALLY does try to separate itself from that flock.
  
  Sometimes, too hard and other times, not hard enough.
  
  
  Gabriela Cowperthwaite has directed countless documentaries in the past and based on what I’ve seen here, it feels like minimalism is her preferred style. She does an excellent job at destabilizing what should be climatic exoticism and most of how she takes control and constructs everything is either trim, concise or both, even if it feels like she slims through most of the crisis.
  
  
  Generally speaking, I found the production design my favorite aspect of this entire experience; the shift from genial atmosphere to weightless claustrophobia contributing a lot to the confined setting and Anne Nikitin’s surprisingly dense musical score. Kudos to Geoff Wallace for making these wires and chambers look like a convincing pressure cooker with its colorless corridors.
  
  Thankfully, the handheld cinematography approach avoids the shaky-cam approach, despite opting to go with repetitive close-ups and at least, the editing isn’t completely disorienting. CGI was wonky one minute and surprisingly sturdy the next and while the characters are lacking in personal development or agency, they’re luckily distinct from one another. Plus keeping the ensemble down to just six does wonders for the performers as they often carry the load when everything surrounding them can’t keep up.
  
  Ariana DeBose and Pilou Asbæk are the most dependable, if only just.
  
  
  
  For a while, the presentation and execution of this plot rewarded my curiosity and optimism with all the supposed trenchant and unstable fragility of a collapsing Jenga tower: it’s a story about fragile allegiances and how the vanity of keeping them to both your comarades and/or country when push comes to shove fuels the fire for mutually assured destruction, teetering between broaching and mining political, ethical and spiritual ideas through a 80’s blockbuster lens. Putting the familiar concept to one side, however, it is a preposterous set-up that needs to be stretched out to sell you on the supposed stake it wants to set up and the script, unfortunately, cannot live up to those expectations. While not an immense trainwreck, it’s completely void of anything that creatively stands out, either unable to or unwilling to roll with the setup it created due to its budget limitations.
  
  Just like the first two Alien movies, there’s an attempt at immediate tension, one that has the potential to siphon some real Twilight Zone energy coming in on the film’s periphery, especially just around the 90 minute mark. But all of that gets underplayed and loses focus not even halfway through the picture as they don’t even know where to take the drama beyond forgettable slug punches and exposition. Sure, it has a refreshing pace and it wastes no time but where’s the novelty in that when you can’t bring yourself to care about anyone, especially since, again, most of these characters are paper-thin, insubstantial and mundane and that’s not even mentioning the litany of STUPID decisions they make.
  
  
  I can understand being in life-threatening situations can obscure anyone’s ability to think logically but these I.S.S scientists have to be trained for these types of encounters; poor-life threatening choices work better in teen slashers than a sci-fi thriller (and keep in mind, I hate the damn stupid character trope to begin with).
  
  There’s also the problem of having “too much of a good thing”, ok? Look, so many dystopian movies we have (2012, Geostorm, Greenland, WarGames) choose destruction as the main premise to drive the actual crux of the story forward but sometimes you make a story too dystopian, that it almost doesn’t matter what any of the characters do. It’s bad enough that the manner in which everything goes wrong is too convenient but it also rips away the urgency the movie spent the last few minutes building up to.
  
  Doesn’t help much that the relatively low budget doesn’t pack the same punch as other space films with a similar framework. It’s also made very clear how it wants to tap into either a sense of contemporary moral relativism or 80’s patriotism and it just never gets the chance. That’s probably the most detrimental aspect to the short runtime: it feels counterintuitive to how much the film wants to accomplish and what it actually achieves.
  
  
  
  Depending on what you’re searching for, this space thriller will either be worth keeping afloat or burn up on re-entry with merely an effort. Me personally, I’m straddling in the in-between.

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