Ariana DeBose goes on a space odyssey aboard the International Space Station
Without the periods in the title’s acronym, “I.S.S.” stands for the International Space Station (ISS), the setting of director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s sci-fi suspense film. The indie, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival last year, tries to merge a Cold War-era paranoid thriller with an F/X-laden space opera. Though the special effects look better than expected, and the acting by “West Side Story” Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose is first-rate, “I.S.S.” is an uneven movie that could have used more time for fleshing out its characters before turning them against one another.
To quote her infamous BAFTA Angela Bassett rap, DeBose “did the thing” as Kira, the newest member on the ISS. As in real life, the space station is manned by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. An opening screen gives a brief history of the vessel before informing us that the film’s timeframe is the near future.
Kira arrives on the Soyuz rocket to join her American colleagues Gordon (“Air”’s Chris Messina) and Christian (John Gallagher Jr). She’s met at the ISS by cosmonauts Weronika (Masha Mashkova), Nicholai (Costa Ronin), and Alexey (Pilou Asbaek). Nicholai and Kira are working on similar biological experiments involving mice, and their first meeting is a chilly one.
Nicholai’s sinister line about the fate of mice in space — “it doesn’t end well” — is supposed to inspire unease, but it comes off as one of the more predictable foreshadowing moments of Nick Shafir’s derivative script. Another is the protracted argument about Russian and American politics provoked by, of all things, the whistle-heavy 1991 Scorpions power ballad “Wind of Change.” You know the one that goes “I follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park/ Listening to the wind of change.”
Change is certainly about to come for this crew. Kira complains about not feeling “the overview effect” when she first looks out of the ISS to see Earth. That effect gives astronauts a sweeping cognitive change in how they see their place in the universe, after experiencing the view from space. Kira feels nothing initially, but of course, this is more foreshadowing.
The next time Kira looks at our big blue marble of a planet, it’s erupting in gigantic plumes of bright orange explosions. Apparently, nuclear war has broken out between Russia and the United States, and the Earth is quickly set aflame as far as the eye can see. Cowperthwaite, cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews, and the F/X team use numerous eerie background shots of Earth engulfed in fire as the film progresses.
Everyone onboard the ISS is in panic mode, wondering about the fate of their families. The situation gets worse once Gordon receives a top-secret transmission that tells him to take control of the ISS “by any means necessary.” He assumes that the Russians have also received the same message from their government, which leads to rampant distrust in space as the world burns below. That distrust quickly devolves into violence.
As the Russians and Americans go back and forth trading the upper hand, some of the actions of the characters seem inexplicable. It would help if the film had made us care about them. Short of a good spacewalk scene where Gordon and Kira exchange stories of heartbreak and loss, we learn so little about these people that their outcomes barely register.
An allegiance between Weronika and Kira, the two women on the ship, is cut short just as it gets interesting. Cowperthwaite and Shafir are so hot to get to the fight scenes in weightlessness, and shots of droplets of blood oozing out of jugulars, that they fail to see the dramatic potential in their scenario. There’s no commentary about gender roles in science, loyalty to one’s country, or the scary notion of blindly following orders even when they make no sense.
I get that “I.S.S.” wants to be a modern-day B-movie, but even those movies of old had something to say, no matter how disreputable they may have seemed to the studios that produced them. This film isn’t terrible; it’s just empty. There are few things more disappointing than a genre movie that forgoes developing its intriguing premise to focus on cheap, failed attempts to thrill.