Having already stranded Mads Mikkelsen in the Arctic Circle, director Joe Penna apparently decided that his next survival film would amp up the desolation, settling upon the only plausible option: outer space. This time, however, the struggle for resources involves a horrific moral calculus, to be worked out by a crew of four. As the title suggests, it was meant to be three; Stowaway opens with the launch of a rocket headed for Mars (the year is never stated, but there’s a colony in place), commanded by Marina Barnett (Toni Collette) and including biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) and medic Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick). They’re on a two-year mission, roughly half of which will be spent in transit, six months each way. Only when they’re some distance from Earth, however, do they discover that a NASA tech dude, Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), got knocked unconscious while making a last-minute check of the ship’s innards, somehow failed to be noticed as missing, and so inadvertently came along for the ride.
Now, did they pack enough toothpaste for four people? Stowaway’s actual concern is considerably more urgent than that, and complicated by Michael turning out to be the nicest person imaginable. After an understandable initial freakout—this is the ultimate version of that old party-hard cautionary tale about passing out and awakening in another country—he declares himself ready to assist his crewmates in any way that he can, volunteering to do grunt work and eventually serving as David’s assistant for on-board experiments with microgreens. Penna and his regular co-writer/editor, Ryan Morrison, stack the deck further by giving Michael a younger sister who depends upon him (NASA, upon learning what happened, immediately assumes her care), along with a tragic backstory involving the two of them surviving an apartment fire that killed their parents. He’s pretty much the last guy in the world you’d want to politely ask to please stop breathing. But, then, none of them are “in the world” at all—and math is unforgiving.
Like everything else in Stowaway, this dilemma gets handled with a gratifying degree of verisimilitude. The launch sequence at the beginning involves enough credible-sounding jargon to make most such movie scenes feel phony by comparison; a dozen or so consultants get cited in the closing credits, and it’s clear that Penna and Morrison utilized them to fashion as realistic a depiction of manned space travel as they could, given their presumably modest budget. (One clever touch: a pendant hanging around Zoe’s neck indicates when the ship leaves Earth’s gravity and when artificial gravity kicks in.) Rather than pretend that human beings could reach Mars in one go, the film depicts how it might actually work, which involves the initial rocket docking with an ultra-long segmented craft that then rotates its way to the fourth planet, tumbling end over end. That layout figures heavily into the movie’s climax, which sees two crew members embark upon a truly dangerous 11th-hour effort to keep all four of them alive for the duration.
While ably orchestrated, this final stretch—featuring actors in spacesuits scrambling around a damaged ship—inevitably recalls Gravity, and lacks the technical facility to compete with Alfonso Cuarón at his most ingenious. Similarly, an initial solution to the problem involving David and his algae will feel familiar to anyone who saw Matt Damon struggle to expand his food supply in The Martian. That film spends half of its time on the ground observing NASA’s brain trust, but Stowaway leans into its small ensemble’s isolation. During all communications with Earth, we hear only the crew’s half of the transmission, and it’s quickly clear that nobody back home has any non-devastating answers.
The film is strongest when simply exploring the terrible notion of triage among the healthy, with everyone involved fully aware of which individual will be deemed the most expendable. (While race is never so much as hinted at on screen, casting a Black man in that role nonetheless adds pointed subtext.) All four actors do fine work, with Anderson deftly avoiding pushing Michael’s vulnerability into the saccharine zone and the others spanning an emotional spectrum that ranges from hard-headed practicality to anguished denial. In the end, Stowaway becomes a full-fledged weepie, acknowledging the vast emptiness into which its characters have either willingly or accidentally thrust themselves. Nature doesn’t care.
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It sounds like this is at least loosely based on the Tom Godwin short story “The Cold Equations”, which you can read here: https://www.drabblecast.org/2013/07/15/drabblecast-289-the-cold-equations/
It’s possible to find various negative essays on this story, too. The short version is, Godwin originally intended the story to end positively, but John W. Campbell demanded rewrite after rewrite to make it end negatively, for reasons of his own supposed hard-nosed realism.
I’d hope the movie knows that history and avoids repeating it.
https://locusmag.com/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard
Thanks for this link, I hadn’t read this before. I agree with its general sentiment that the whole thing is a contrivance to set up the need for the girl to die, but I’m not entirely sure that’s altogether bad (aside from the age-old trope of the girl making an irrational emotional decision and the man having to explain to her why she was not smart enough – at least this movie seems to be correcting the sexist/misogynist bits). Most of what I like about sci-fi is how the human elements play out in otherworldly settings. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I think it’s entirely plausible that world powers and corporations will still care about power and profit above creating ideal conditions for safety for the lowly workers, so the supply ship only having just enough fuel to arrive makes sense – fuel eats into profits. I don’t necessarily think we’re meant to feel sorry for the corporation, but I don’t have a problem sympathizing with the pilot, because he’s just labor. I would say that I think the movie is not going to go that dark, but that George Clooney post-apocalypse Netflix movie back in December did actually go that dark, so I don’t actually know what to expect.
That’s kind of a smug analysis from Doctorow. The whole point of the story is that hard sci-fi is run by the laws of physics, which don’t include deus ex machina or Geordi LaForge reprogramming the tachyon array on the deflector dish to blanch butter or raise the dead or whatever they need done after the last commercial break.People make mistakes, and sometimes brilliant engineers find a way out of a crisis a la Apollo 13, and sometimes they don’t as in the Challenger explosion. Those astronauts rocketing towards Earth after the Challenger blew up in the still-intact crew pod had plenty of time to search for blame in the minutes it took them to crash into the ocean and all that blamestorming mattered not one bit. The only laws we all really have to obey, those of physics, don’t leave room for last-minute rescues of everyone, no matter how undeserving they are of their fate.
Maybe Doctorow could also reflect on how the Harland and Wolff builders should have capped the watertight compartments on the Titanic, which I’m sure was great comfort to Thomas Andrews to know it was Someone Else’s Fault as he drowned in the North Atlantic.
but John W. Campbell demanded rewrite after rewrite to make it end negatively, for reasons of his own supposed hard-nosed realism.Or because his tarot cards told him to.
I hate The Cold Equations and much prefer my story ‘The Hot Takes’:Synopsis:A 22nd century pilot named Campbell finds a stowaway on his one man ship. Its his wife, with a briefcase. The two are separated and hate each other but he refuses to sign divorce papers to allow her to get remarried(as this would make her happy) , and in public pretends to be a wounded but loving husband .Said pilot Campbell is also slimy misogynistic douchebag. Mrs Campbell desperate to remarry ,figured that being in a confined space with her would force him to finally sign the divorce papers , so stowed away .Seeing a chance to get rid of her , he quotes a 50 year old ‘never actually used’ bylaw about stowaways having to be jettisoned, as the ship cant safely reach its destination with too many people on board . She points out that surely there enough safeties and fall-backs built in to a modern space craft to avoid such an issue . He goes through the ship and ‘checks’ all the redundancies with her , secretly sabotaging them as he does , so that the ship now genuinely cant carry two to safely .She eventually agrees to the bylaw , but when they get to the airlock , bashes him on the head with the briefcase and jettisons him out of the ship.Plot twist! Smiling she hails the destination star base (on the comms he earlier claimed were malfunctioning) and ‘tearfully’ tells them of how her late husband made the ultimate sacrifice when a secret romantic trip on his ship went horribly wrong.Second plot twist!, its actually a fictional story written by a woman named Marilyn Godwin . She’s sitting in a graveyard typing the finishing touches to it . Turns out as a teen she was ejected into space by a slimy misogynistic sociopath named Campbell in a similar situation , where he ignored all the easy ways they both could safely arrived and ejected her into space ,quoting the bylaw from her story. She was later found and revived with 28th century technology , and while living a fantastic life in the far future misses her family . Standing up she sends the story to her publisher, picks up a a sledgehammer and starts demolishing a gravestone which reads “Campbell”.
This critique is itself flawed. Some of the things he complains weren’t addressed, were. And of course it’s set up to make the stowaway (and everyone else) a victim. That’s the plot.
It’s
possible to find various negative essays on this story, too.
…
https://locusmag.com/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazardCory Doctorow knows more than I do, but I feel like he’s doing a little projecting backward onto the two stories he discusses. Like, the point of “Cold Equations” isn’t to construct a story engine to kill a girl. It’s to make some kind of argument that our new frontier of space is going to be difficult and unforgiving, and is going to require more from us than past frontiers have. Misogny wasn’t the entire point.
As for Farnham’s Freehold: I fully agree the book is “problematic”. But I think Doctorow’s (well-intentioned and otherwise perceptive) criticism of the lifeboat-rules bit is – well, I think he’s focusing on the wrong target. Heinlein has different fish to fry in that book, so criticizing him for limiting his “story’s boundary to the boat’s gunwales, not to the poleconomy” is to not meet the story on its own terms.
Gosh there’s so much to talk about with Farnham’s Freehold. I’ve always thought that the knee-jerk criticism that the book is RACIST, which has been the default mode of discussion around the book for 50+ years, is off base. I think Heinlein wrote a particularly nasty bit of Swiftian satire about race. I think he’s going for, the black “race” takes over after a nuclear holocaust, and they are every bit as terrible to the white people as the white people had been to them. Exactly as bad. It’s unpleasant as fuck: gawd, so unpleasant. But not “racist” in any simple & obvious way.The most hateful parable, rather.
The 1980s Twilight Zone did a great adaptation of this story.
Yeah, I listen to the old time radio version from X Minus One from time to time.
Another good story along those lines is Ray Bradbury’s Kaliedoscope, which is also on either X Minus One or Dimension X.
I was coming here to post the same thought. I read that story in high school (Class of 1981!).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations
I was going to say that! I fear that although it’s one of the all time classics, it is being forgotten by much of the last generation or two of SF readers. I think when I read it (at a probably much too young age) it may well have been the first story I ever read with a downbeat ending.
Thanks for this. I sat here and read it at work yesterday and wept. What a good one.
I’ve never heard of the short story this was based on but apparently it has a long, controversial history within the sci-fi community. The author himself hated the ending, both for its meanness and lousy engineering, which was forced upon him by John W. Campbell (a truly terrible writer and buddy of L. Ron Hubbard.) https://observer.com/2021/04/stowaway-netflix-review-the-cold-equations/I might give it a gander but, honestly, the idea of a space stowaway is literally out of “Lost in Space.”
There was an episode like this in the 90’s…maybe Twilight Zone or Outer Limits..with umm.. the exact same plot.
“Michael we’ve got a loose ball bearing on the x-9 unit in the airlock. Can you check it out?”“Golly! X-9s don’t take ball bearings, and more importantly, x-9s don’t even exist! I better get down there and fix this pickle! No time to suit up or even put on an oxygen mask!”>WHOOOOSH!<*Crew looks at each other, smirking and high fiving***Credits**
“Jonas, we have a loose golden sprocket behind that pipe. Can you lean over and get it for me?”
Oh wait, different kind of movie.
They could also have sent him for a long weight. A very long weight.
Incoming message from NASA:Spacecraft One, we are proud to tell you that we’ve included 165lbs of long pig for you to consume on your journey…
Hello internet rocket scientists reading this,Would an extra grown man that wasn’t planned for noticeably affect the rocket in lift-off? Increased fuel burn or trajectory issues maybe, I don’t know, I studied biology.
Internet non rocket not scientist here: Probably in the 1960s. not so much today. with the advances in telemetry and automation, likely 165lbs of additional weight at launch would be handled automatically by a fraction of a second longer burn on launch, and probably only noticed by post launch analysis weeks later.
Not a scientist. Just play a lot of Kerbal Space Program. Will the extra weight have a measurable effect? Yes. In real world execution not so much. All rockets have safety margins for fuel and thrust in place. Space X rockets can lose an engine on ascent and the craft automatically recomputes burn times based on 8 engines vs 9. Plus those rockets carry enough extra fuel to land so they have more than enough fuel margin to shoot up an additional 200 lb person. As for trajectory the rocket is always computing and adjusting it’s location in space. So if the extra weight affects the trajectory it will simply adjust to get back on course.With respect to interplanetary travel fuel gets a bit tighter. In most interplanetary flights they have multiple scheduled burns to correct course. Most flights they skip a few burns because the course is within tolerances. If they found a stowaway they could skip more of those corrections and find enough fuel to do what is needed.
Considering the total weight, I think it would only be a foot or two in any direction at the end of the trip up, small enough to be attributable to not having an exact measure of atmospheric conditions for every inch of the trip/altitude (a small, localized breeze).
No, a human wouldn’t make enough of a difference to be noticable, these rockets also send up satellites and bring a lot of gear with them, they have variable enough payload capacity to handle an additional couple hundred pounds without making a difference. There is a scene in this movie, right in the beginning at launch, where they say one of their rockets is performing suboptimally but I don’t think that’s supposed to be Mr. Stowaway’s weight throwing things off;
I think it actually is supposed to be that.
I also thought it was supposed to be that. Their initial burn didn’t get them to their calculated position – there’s a long pause where Toni Collete might have to trigger an ocean abort – then mission control tells them it’s ok, they have enough fuel to compensate.
The real question is what kind of rinky dink space outfit would have less than a 25% redundancy of oxygen.
I think they covered that. The “stowaway”, his body had been thrown into like a CO2 rinser or an O2 stash or something. Whatever it was, he broke it, and a module that they were depending on became unusable. Wrecked a big portion of their oxygen capacity for the journey.
Thanks that would explain things. However I would think that action would eliminate any sympathy for the stowaway
Well: but I think it wasn’t presented as an “action” he took. Just part of the accident that led to him being trapped on board.I wonder if something wound up on the cutting-room floor, some dialogue exchange that explained exactly how he wound up on board. From what I remember, we never got a definitive explanation.
So as an engineer in the aerospace industry: Not enough to be noticeable at least in the way the film describes it. Usually there’s a lot of margin when it comes to rocket payload capacity and engineers at each level of design tends to add more uncertainty or industry margin such that it’s often over designed to account for human error (a lot more so than the 160-200lb human limit).
Overall, I liked the movie. It was grounded and didn’t veer into slasher film territory like so many of these dramas tend to go. Nor did it try to go into bombastic “this thing explodes suddenly” territory. I would admit from a “movie” standpoint, it didn’t make for anything terribly exciting but ironically it reflected better on what space travel would actually be like…aka not terribly exciting and flashy.
It was bleak and lonely, the stowaway wasn’t some random person (though how and why he ended up where he ended up, survived through launch etc is a big mystery) and no one on board was acting out of malice despite the ordeal. Everyone was rationale and struggling with the ethics which is what the intention of the filmmakers really tried to show. There maybe some debate as to why it was a black person that was chosen as a stowaway, or why it had to be the white savior to save the black person, but I think people are reading too much into it. Kendrick’s character just ended up being the youngest and best fit to do the job at the end. Also, why the stowaway was considered to be the sacrificial lamb was an obvious choice from the mission perspective as morally complex as that decision was.
The one problem I do have (from an engineering and mission design standpoint) is why a system as important as removing CO2 was only on the launch vehicle and redundant systems did not exist on the MTS. For a mission such as Mars, critical systems involving life support would have redundancy upon redundancy especially if you’re only sending a three person crew over a two year journey. There wouldn’t be the expectation that in a three person crew (two of which has biology focuses) that you would have one engineer (Toni Collettes character) that would know about all the engineering for the craft. That’s just poor mission planning and poor engineer design
math is unforgivingYou might say that the equations are very cold.
*Puts on sunglasses*YEAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
It’s very cold…….in space.
Affable stowaways have been awkwardly popping up on spaceships for decades, apparently.
Ten thousand blistering blue barnacles! Wooah! Wooah! Jews and Chinese people will swarm the Western World! Etc.
Tintin: The Cold Equations
(Spoilers for Tintin)In fact, the stowaway situation in the Tintin adventure, Explorers on the Moon, plays out very much like “The Cold Equations” (the ship has insufficient oxygen to keep everyone alive for the whole expedition, so one of the crew sacrifices his life that the others might live by stepping out of an airlock).
It’s similar enough that you might suspect that one “borrowed” from the other, but Tintin came first by a few months, and I doubt that Godwin or Campbell read Le Journal de Tintin.
I don’t think I’ve read Explorers on the Moon, but from the picture above I’m guessing it’s the guy on the left…?
Dr. Smith, for another.
Any time I read a positive review of a Netflix film, I’m always trying to read between the lines to see if the reviewer is saying “This is a good movie” or “This is a good-for-Netflix movie.”
This is another not good Netflix movie. Literally just a bunch of stuff that happened. In space.
Damn. I hate movies where stuff happens.
Reminds me of the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic from east to west (against the prevailing winds), achieved by the airship R.34 in 1919. They discovered during the afternoon of the first day out that a young member of the team who had been bumped from the flight roster in favor of a VIP to save weight had stowed away… and that he had brought one of their mascots, a cat.They were over the Atlantic by then, and therefore the captain rejected the option he might have exercised over land of giving him a parachute and their best wishes.Of course, oxygen and food and trajectory calculations were not problems, and with an intended crew of 8 officers, 22 enlisted men, and two dogs, they presumably had a bit of safety margin in what they could lift… Still, reaching their intended destination (Long Island) was a very near thing with regard to fuel, and they made contingency plans for landing in the Boston area instead before deciding to press on.But it all ended well, and before long she made the first round trip across the Atlantic by air.(from https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17525985.museum-celebrates-epic-voyage-r34/
What a wonderful story! Thanks for the pointer.
Reminds me of Mittens at the Perry Bible Fellowship…
Because of the cat, was he put into stasis and ended up three million years into deep space?
if the cat had been thrown out, i would have found you & killed you for telling us this.
Calling Dr. Smith; phone call for Dr. Smith.Danger!!!
Not NASA — a private company called Hyperion … I found it interesting that they mentioned several times how Hyperion kept pushing the envelope and cutting costs – perhaps a subtle jab at privatizing space exploration?
So what’s the dilemma? Tell him you’re sorry then throw his ass out the airlock.
I don’t think this is too spoilery, but I spent most of the movie trying to understand why turning back wouldn’t have been the obvious best option. Did anyone ever address that? Were we supposed to assume the mission was more important than human lives?
Toni Collette’s character had a brief bit of dialogue where she explained they had picked up too much velocity and didn’t have enough fuel to return to earth. So it had less to do with the importance of the mission and more to do with the realities of orbital mechanics (I say this as someone whose only knowledge of orbital mechanics and interplanetary travel comes from playing Kerbal Space Program).
Yeah I missed that completely. Thanks for the response.
There was a very thorough discussion on the preview for this on io9 last month I think if you’re interested in the “why” behind the answer.
Thanks, those were some interesting conversations.
Lifeboat to Lifepod to Stowaway.
This looks like this probably won’t fill the For All Mankind hole in my life (what a stunning end to a great second series!).
Apollo 13 says “LOL wut?”
I’m surprised by the B rating, this film was a total bore. The film is propped up by random obstacles that just get thrown in by the writers, they don’t feel earned, it just feels like, “well we need something to happen here, so…this thing will break, or this thing will fail…” I guess its a good show piece for the actors to all show how somber and serious they can be, but its not terribly interesting sci-fi nor human drama.
Watched this last night and, God damn, this was awful AND problematic.
1) Cast: So, instantly, the black guy’s life is expendable. It’s just right there and no one addresses that. He is literally and explicitly worth less than anyone else on board. It’s only through Hathaway’s pleading and badgering that Kim and Collette move on that. It’s so obvious, I can’t believe that it wasn’t a deliberate casting choice. 2) Plot #1: How the hell did he end up behind a bolted down panel? He fell in there? And it happened to be a place where there was heat and air? What? I get the weight difference not being that big a deal (though I do believe that the velocity difference was a hint), but where he was a big question.3) Plot #2: Why wasn’t that first tank of oxygen secured at all? It should have had a rope attached even if they were just on a boat.We kept on waiting for a plot reveal re: #2 (Plot #1). That it was sabotage of some type. But, no. We didn’t think that Hyperion was supposed to be NASA and maybe there was supposed to be something in there more about privatized space cutting corners in the name of profit or a reason someone wanted the flight to fail, but nothing.
And so, the literally worthless black guy is saved by the noble white woman. Great.
1) That character was the least useful person on the ship, they could have cast a white guy for the role instead but I don’t think that’s a great option.2) I kept waiting for a better explanation, how could he fall into that spot? I realize that what is now a ceiling was probably a wall when he was working on it, but nobody noticed that he went to fix something and never came out/signed off on fixing thing that would have been on the preflight checklist?3) It was, the tank was tied to both characters, then Kendrick took it solo when they got to the solar array. She lost it when she hit the shuttle at high speed, so not super secure but it definitely “had a rope attached”, you can see both ends floating out.Completely agree on that last line, “you don’t have the training” to sacrifice yourself was a bs excuse. If Anna Kendrick can do climb some cables twice, I’m sure that Shamier Anderson can do it and be the hero of the movie. Especially since it’s already been established in (1) that the other three are 100% necessary.
I’m sorry, I don’t think it was “problematic.” The inadvertent stowaway just happened to be black. The characters (including, apparently, the stowaway), didn’t seem to give that a second thought, and the writer didn’t either, so why should we?
He wasn’t expendable because he was black but because he wasn’t trained for the mission and would be useless on the trip there and when they arrived. The film addresses this. The others had trained specifically for the mission. Does it make the viewer very uncomfortable? Yes, absolutely, but that wasn’t the reason for wanting to jettison him. Are all those other plot points strange chocies? Yes, I agree.
That’s all very woke but I thought it was pretty obvious that the subtext of him being black and being viewed as “worthless” was part of the film. That doesn’t mean that is the position of the film.
I agree with most of your points but I’m not sure the movie feels Michael to be worthless. In fact, I think the whole thing is a treatise on the inherent value in all life. I think Anna Kendrick’s character clearly believed that, as evidenced by her story about saving the guy from drowning and almost drowning herself. I think her choice to sacrifice herself is an acknowledgement that Michael’s life is worth just as much as hers, despite her value to the mission.
Add in one tiny, swappable unit that ensured their survival re: breathing that did not have a replacement, but lots of space for large hallways (to fit a camera crew, too, but still).
This is a bottle episode. I thought it was interesting – feels like the whole thing could have been put on the stage – also feels like you could interchange every actor with every role and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.
I will watch Toni Collete in anything, so that’s settled.
that’s exactly why i watched this! have you been spying on me????