Minor SPOILERS are ahead for Stowaway, which is streaming on Netflix now.
Over the weekend, the latest Netflix original Stowaway took us into the orbit of a spaceship en route to Mars on a two-year mission. The tense thriller starring Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim and Toni Collette felt primed to conceal some sort of intergalactic mystery or horrific tale, but it was what it was. Stowaway is about the pitfalls of traveling through the stars. If you were shocked the movie didn’t involve aliens or bloodshed, you wouldn’t be the only one, as Daniel Dae Kim was too.
When the Lost alum spoke about Stowaway’s lack of a big bad other than, well… space, he shared his own early reactions to the storyline. Here’s what Daniel Dae Kim said:
It's a lot more like real life. When you're reading a script like this and you're just told it's set in space, I remember reading the first act and going, 'Oh, wait they're low on oxygen, is this going to be a creature feature? Is this going to be something on our ship?’ And then you find out that it's not and you ask, ‘Is this person going to try to murder everyone?' So there are all the tropes your mind goes through as you read a script, but it was really refreshing to see that it wasn't about any of those things, it was about man vs. nature. There was no villain, just thoughtfully fleshed out characters.
Well look at that, I had the exact same thought process while watching the movie from writer/director Joe Penna. As Daniel Dae Kim shared to Collider, when he found out about the small crew’s limited oxygen, he expected them to come across some kind of alien or fight each other to the death. The movie certainly offers up the setup for situations like these, and we’ve seen so many other movies in space by now that we fully expect that kind of thing to go down.
Instead, Stowaway is more about walking the audience through the types of honest human errors that could happen during space travel and what sacrifices may need to be made. Despite sharing some of the hard realities when humans leave Earth’s orbit, the Netflix release does have an optimistic viewpoint on decision-making during a crisis.
Stowaway was even fact checked by NASA, which revealed that the events of the movie could in fact happen, and some of the decisions made would be in line with what would help a mission survive. The storyline revolves around Shamier Anderson’s Michael, who is the titular stowaway by error and complicates the mission to Mars by simply breathing the same air as the three other astronauts on board. Check out the Stowaway trailer:
Now the question becomes, did we want to see aliens and murder in Stowaway? Critics overall enjoyed the movie and audiences seem to be in the mixed category regarding the film. You tell us by voting in the poll below and check out what’s new to Netflix in May.
