Lost in Space
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
Stowaway (Joe Penna) rated TV-MA 116 min.
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): After spending a lot of time lately watching the Oscars telecast last Sunday, struggling with problems in my new home phone system, and being concerned about possible medical challenges for my almost-15-year-old-cat, I haven’t put much energy toward new cinematic options for review (still just streaming for me, even though some local theaters are open and I’m fully vaccinated; at 73—with new COVID-variants raising their ugly spikes, too damn many people still wandering around maskless in my area—I’m not ready yet for that long-awaited-commercial-movie-experience), so I’ve got only 1 (reasonably-effective) option to pass on to you, but first—in case you haven’t seen anything else about this yet—the reason why the Oscars gave the Best Picture award prior to Best Actress (winner Francis McDormand in Nomadland, for most a surprise) and Best Actor (an even bigger surprise of Anthony Hopkins in The Father)* was because the producers were expecting a dramatic finish with Chadwick Boseman getting a posthumous Best Actor Oscar (for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), only to be undercut by Hopkins’ win, further diminished by Sir Anthony not even being available via satellite for an acceptance speech so the show closed “Not with a bang but a whimper” (thank you, T.S. Eliot, from The Hollow Men [1925]). Too bad for the legacy of Boseman (and the show’s tanked ratings overall), but, still, a worthy win for Hopkins, much as I’d have preferred for Chadwick to have finished out his distinguished career with an Oscar.
With the above aspects in mind, I’m lacking energy to do all that much with Stowaway (no fault of the movie, because it's well worth your time to watch if you’re a Netflix streaming subscriber) except to summarize, recommend to you this near-future-story of a man who accidently ends up on a 2-year-voyage to Mars in a spaceship designed to provide oxygen for only 3 intended crew members, with the ship’s carbon dioxide filter damaged in the process leaving our extraterrestrial voyagers with a major problem because under these circumstances none will survive before reaching the already-established-base on the Red Planet. What they do through various attempts to save themselves is the entire substance of this narrative, enhanced by the claustrophobic setting of the space vehicle where there’s little option for alone-time along with the constant interactions of the 4-person-cast (Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson) appropriately adding to the escalating-tension. Also, in the Short Takes section I’ll offer suggestions for some choices on the Turner Classic Movies channel (but too much extra text for line-justified-layout like you see here [Related Links stuff at each posting’s end is similarly-ragged], at least to be done by this burned-out-BlogSpot-drone—oh, ye tedious software!) along with my standard dose of industry-related-trivia.
*A bit more detailed commentary on the Oscar winners is in my now-amended-posting from April 22, 2021 along with notations of all those winners appended to the predictions (I even got to celebrate 14 of my 20 preferences [70%]—didn’t see enough in 3 of the categories to make such choices—although you could say that I got 14 of 19 preferences [74%] as 1 of mine wasn’t even nominated).
Here’s the trailer for Stowaway:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $. To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid those important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters like this:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: In some unspecified (but clearly intended to be in our relatively-near-future) time (far enough from now that Earthlings have traveled to Mars—with or without Elon Musk—and have established a scientific base there, seemingly run by the Hyperion Corp.) a 2-year-out-and-back-mission is the focus of our story as Commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick), and biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) blast off to our neighboring planet to further the research needed to see if humans can survive in those barren conditions. All seems to go well on the launch of their booster rocket (although we see how uncomfortable this part of the trip is as they’re actively jostled around [David vomits] until they’ve left Earth’s atmosphere and gravity, achieving weightlessness) which then drops its blast-off-stages as the remaining capsule docks with the larger ship that will actually propel them on their journey, with the capsule ultimately tethered to the primary ship by extremely long metal poles so the 2 units can rotate, creating gravity within the main ship for the crew. 12 hours into the launch, though, Barnett notices some blood dripping from an overhead panel, opens it up to find Launch Support Engineer Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson) unconscious as falls to the floor, in the process damaging the CDRA device essential for filtering carbon dioxide from the air within the ship (apparently at some point when he was doing some final checks he slipped, suffered a concussion, was totally out until revived after getting medical attention from Zoe). Michael’s immediately frantic to be on this lengthy voyage because he needs to be back home to take care of his sister (their father died when they were young, they’ve been supporting each other ever since), but that problem’s taken care of when Marina makes contact with Hyperion back on Earth, who agree to take care of the sister for Michael.
That situation solved, the more immediate problem is the ship’s oxygen supply was barely intended to support 3 people, not 4, with the damaged CDRA unit needing to be supplemented by emergency lithium hydroxide canisters, but they’ve got only enough to clean the oxygen for 2 of this suddenly-endangered-group. Michael agrees to help out with mission tasks as Barnett orders David to cultivate the algae he was scheduled to work with on Mars in order to generate more oxygen, but half of his colony dies quickly, leaving them with only enough to sustain 3 people. At this point, Barnett and Kim come to the horrible decision of asking Michael to painlessly terminate himself with an injection from Zoe’s materials; he’s terrified to do it but agrees, yet Zoe’s furious they’d even consider such an action without trying to find some other solution, convinces Michael to wait (tells him a story of how she had a beach job years ago, tried to save a drunk guy from drowning [his friends were too out of it to help], lost him, regretting it ever since). What they decide to attempt, then, is for Zoe and David to make the slow, arduous climb along the connectors to their original capsule to retrieve liquid oxygen, but after they’ve filled one tank a dangerously-radioactive-solar-storm’s headed their way so they come back to the main ship with only 1 tank instead of 2. It gets worse: as they arrive “home” Zoe slips, drops the tank, watches it float away. ⇒Zoe insists on going back, despite the storm, to get the other tank because the precious oxygen is slipping away out there—due to her and David quickly evacuating the module, no time to shut it down properly—which she does; as she delivers it safely this time, though, it’s clear she’ll choose to die of radiation-poisoning outside of the ship, leaving (presumably) a survival-likelihood for the others until they reach Mars.⇐
So What? Certainly there are several aspects of Stowaway you could find are done in the more extraordinary (as well as much more expensive) films within the serious aspects of the outer-space-oriented-Science-Fiction genre, such as with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick [1968]) and Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón [2013])—or even The Martian (Ridley Scott [2015]) where the challenge isn’t to get to Mars with an extra crew member but to survive there by an astronaut accidently left behind by his departing mates, or for that matter a history-based-space-drama such as Apollo 13 (Ron Howard [1995]) where an onboard-crisis jeopardizes the return of American astronauts from a moon mission—but that’s not to denigrate what we get here in a much-more-limited-intensions-story (done on a considerably-more-limited-budget), more about how human beings seek solutions for impending disaster as part of this specific voyage rather than what they might encounter while trying to explore the possibility of actually relocating humans to Mars in an attempt to ultimately save our increasingly-fragile-planet as our various national leaders keep denying climate change in an attempt to preserve the disastrous fossil-fuel/agricultural industries that may ultimately leave us with a home variously decimated by draughts, floods, grossly-polluted air and water, species die-offs, all of which are already contributing to the demise of planet Earth. This story’s more of a microcosm of those larger issues, focusing on the realities of immediate dangers challenging a specific (but intentionally representative) small group looking for functional solutions to impending disaster, finding ways to work together to achieve survival even if sacrifices are necessary to accomplish their desired results.
However, while everything works well from a storytelling angle here—except its resemblance to other types of these narratives such as I’ve cited above, the familiarity we now have with them leading us to easily expect in this movie either some form of miraculous recovery or a situation where death can’t be avoided—there’s also the sociological aspect to consider given the horrible ongoing situation of the George Floyd-along-with-so-many-other-Blacks-needlessly-killed-by-White-authorities-cultural-climate we're now sadly-inhabiting because (as I purposely haven’t noted until now, although you could easily know from the trailer) Michael’s a Black man caught up in a situation he has no control over (having also unintentionally caused damage intensifying the already-fraught-situation) yet he’s being asked by 2 of the crew (1 White, 1 Asian-American) to terminate himself for the good of those intended to be on this mission while he’s an accidental stowaway. The problem comes from why he’s there, not who he is, but given the horrible racial environment the U.S. presently faces (conclusive conviction of Floyd’s killer-policeman notwithstanding), this aspect of the movie may either be a troubling distraction for some viewers or an acknowledgement of racial inequality in our society for others. Similarly, in risking herself on Michael’s behalf, will Zoe be seen (as intended, I’m sure) as a person trying to put herself out for the good of the group or will she be condemned as yet-another-“necessary”-White-savior (although it should be noted Michael’s injuries while he was unconscious during blastoff prevented him from making the climb to the capsule in the quest for more oxygen). Hopefully, these potential aspects of the movie won’t be a disruptive factor in appreciating from what I think it’s trying to accomplish on a humanitarian level, but your comments on such matters are most welcome in the Comments box, way down there at the end of this posting.
Bottom Line Final Comments: In that this movie’s only on Netflix streaming I have no financial figures to offer for it, but I will note the CCAL’s generally supportive with Rotten Tomatoes critics offering 75% positive reviews while the ones at Metacritic are more of their usually-reserved-selves yielding only a 62% average score. I found it to be worthwhile to watch overall (even as aspects of it reminded me a bit too much of other stories of a similar nature, yet it was interesting to see where the development would go here even as the chosen path became more obvious as the events moved toward their clear conclusion). More than that (with my energy waning) I can’t really say at this point, so I’ll just wrap it all up with my usual closure-tactic of a Musical Metaphor toward what’s been previously explored; this time, though, I’ll really push the “metaphorical” aspect with what became a standard song for many country and folk singers in the mid-20th century, “500 Miles Away from Home,” in this case by the song’s most successful singer, Bobby Bare (on his 1963 album named for the tune) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgnaavPxSmk because while this lament is about a guy fully on Earth longing to go home but facing great difficulties in doing so I think it could be extended to the characters in Stowaway as well, especially Michael but increasingly so Zoe and the others in lines like these: “Away from home, away from home Cold and tired and all alone […] If my luck had been just right I’d be with them all tonight But I’m still 500 miles away from home.” A very plaintive song to go along with a plaintive movie, melancholy but intriguing, as I see it.
SHORT TAKES
Suggestions for TCM cablecasts
At least until the pandemic subsides Two Guys also want to encourage you to consider movies you might be interested in that don’t require subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, similar Internet platforms (we may well be stuck inside for longer than those 30-day-free-initial-offers), or premium-tier-cable-TV-fees. While there are a good number of video networks offering movies of various sorts (mostly broken up by commercials), one dependable source of fine cinematic programming is Turner Classic Movies (available in lots of basic-cable-packages) so I’ll be offering suggestions of possible choices for you running from Thursday afternoon of the current week (I usually get this blog posted by early Thursday mornings) on through Thursday morning of the following week. All times are for U.S. Pacific zone so if you see something of interest please verify actual show time in your area for the day listed. These recommendations are my particular favorites (no matter when they’re on, although some of those early-day-ones might need to be recorded, watched later), but there’s considerably more to pick from you might like even better; feel free to explore their entire schedule here. You can also click the down arrow at the right of each listing for additional, useful info.
I’ll bet if you checked that entire schedule link just above you’d find other options of interest, but these are the only ones grabbing my attention at present. Please dig in further for other possibilities.
(TMC is still running most their selections in alphabetical order again this week.)
Thursday April 29, 2021
11:15 PM 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) Gripping jury deliberation drama where a young
man (seemingly Hispanic) accused of killing his father seems a slam-dunk for guilty by this group
of White men until Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) wants to discuss it further, angering some of the others
but he insists on more dialogue. Based on a TV play, this is a single-set, real-time-flow story that becomes increasingly claustrophobic. Marvelous acting by all actors as tensions mount, evidence
is more tightly examined: Fonda, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec, Robert Webber. Nominated for Oscars as Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay but won none. If you miss it today you’ll find it’s also being shown on Wednesday May 5, 2021 at 5:00 PM.
Friday April 30, 2021
5:15 AM 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Sci-fi spectacular, on my All-Time Top 10 list, lots of mysterious, difficult interpretations back then (since clarified with a novel and sequel) about a powerful object enhancing human evolution, with astronauts to Jupiter aided/thwarted by super-computer HAL 9000 as the lone human fights for survival, encounters a transformation. “Star Gate” scene at the end visually-groundbreaking for its time, still impressive; Oscar for Best Special Visual Effects. Followed at 8:00 AM by the helpfully-explanatory sequel, 2010 (Peter Hyams, 1984).
10:00 AM Two Women (Vittorio De Sica, 1960) A mid-20th-century collaboration by Italian cinematic heavyweights, directed and co-written by De Sica, co-written by Cesare Zavatini—both of Italian Neorealism fame—produced by the prolific Carlo Ponti, starring international sensation Sophia Loren (and, for good measure, French New Wave stalwart Jean-Paul Belmondo) in a searing story focused on hardships of a mother and her young daughter in Italy during WW II. Loren won the Best Actress Oscar; she's the first person, male or female, to win an acting Oscar in a non-English-dialogue film.
9:30 PM Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Once a decade, Sight & Sound magazine polls film critics on All-Time #1; in 2012 Vertigo ended Citizen Kane’s (Orson Welles, 1941) 50-year run on top (Kane’s still #1 for me), certainly one of Hitchcock’s best, but a hard choice also. James Stewart’s an ex-cop with a fear of heights, shadowing—then romancing—a friend’s possibly-faithless wife (Kim Novak), who seemingly leaps to her death … or does she? Stewart’s character’s a real departure.
Saturday May 1, 2021
5:00 PM The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) One of the best-known, most-beloved movie musicals of all-time, as Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) and her dog, Toto, are carried by a tornado from her Kansas farm into the land of Oz (cinematography changes from sepia to Technicolor)
where she encounters the Munchkins, Glenda the Good Witch (Billie Burke), the Yellow Brick Road, Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), Tin Man (Jack Haley), and Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) on her journey to
see the Wizard (Frank Morgan), avoid the attacks of the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton). Oscar for “Over the Rainbow” as Best Music, Original Song and an Academy Juvenile Award for Garland; it was also nominated for Best Picture, Art Direction, and Special Effects.
Sunday May 2, 2021
5:00 PM Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955) A typo at the TCM website (!) notes this film’s from 1958 but 1955 is correct. It begins Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (followed immediately by the 2 others, Aparajito [1956] at 7:15 PM, The World of Apu [1959] at 9:15 PM), considered among the world’s masterpieces, brought Western attention to Indian film, used tenets of Italian Neorealism in context of India as it follows the difficult life of a boy, Apu, into his young adult years as tragedies abound.
If you’d like your own PDF of the rating/summary of this week's review, suggestions for TCM cablecasts, links to Two Guys info click this link to access then save, print, or whatever you need.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: Extra items you might like: (1) Some explanations about oddities in this year's (2021) Oscar telecast; (2) Memories of an almost-forgotten American director, Peter Bogdanovich, in that I’ve recently re-watched (on Netflix discs) his great pair of The Last Picture Show (1971) and What’s Up, Doc? (1972); if you’d prefer access via streaming, the former’s on many platforms for $3.99 rental, the latter’s also available on many options from $1.99-$3.99 for rental. As usual for now I’ll close out this section with Joni Mitchell’s "Big Yellow Taxi" (from her 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album)—because “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”—and a reminder that you can search streaming/rental/purchase movie options at JustWatch.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts.* Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage. If you’d like to Like us on Facebook please visit our Facebook page. We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it!
*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problems’ been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.
AND … at least until the Oscars for 2020’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, April 25, 2021 we’re also going to include reminders in each posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which films have been nominated for and/or received various awards and which ones made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists. You may find the diversity among the various awards competitions and the various critics hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competitive-award-winners (which pales when they’re compared to the even-more-noticeable-gap between specific award winners and big box-office-grosses you might want to monitor here as well as here due to many 2020 releases being tracked on the 2021 list, although the income situation for 2020’s skewed due to so many award-contenders getting limited or no theatrical releases)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices for success are as valid as any of these others, especially if you offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike many of the awards voters who simply fill out ballots, sometimes—damn it!—for films they’ve never seen).
To save you a little time scrolling through the “various awards” list above, here are the current Golden Globes nominees and winners for films and TV from 2020-early 2021
along with the Oscar nominees and winners for 2020-early 2021 films.
Here’s more information about Stowaway:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81321986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hic0mz3_U4c (14:21 comments by Scott Manley, the Science Consultant for this movie, trying to compromise realties with fictional intentions; filled with Spoilers!)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stowaway_2021
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/stowaway
Please note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post. You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow connect
with us at that site in order to do it (most FB procedures are still a bit of a mystery to us old farts).
If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work. (But if you truly have too much time on your hands you might want to explore some even-longer-and-more-obtuse-than-my-film-reviews-academic-articles about various cinematic topics at my website, https://kenburke.academia.edu, which could really give you something to talk to me about.)
If we did talk, though, you’d easily see how my early-70s-age informs my references, Musical Metaphors, etc. in these reviews because I’m clearly a guy of the later 20th century, not so much the contemporary world. I’ve come to accept my ongoing situation, though, realizing we all (if fate allows) keep getting older, we just have to embrace it, as Joni Mitchell did so well in "The Circle Game," offering sage advice even when she was quite young herself.
By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check-out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile (quite an eternal while, in fact). Ken
P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker. But wherever the rest of my body may be my heart’s always with my longtime-companion, lover, and wife, Nina Kindblad, so here’s our favorite shared song—Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon"
—from the performance we saw at the Desert Trip concerts in Indio, CA on October 15, 2016 (as a full moon was rising over the stadium) because “I’m still in love with you,” my dearest, a never-changing-reality even as the moon waxes and wanes over the months/years to come.
OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.
Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 25,176 (as always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with our hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers); below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (with appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):
No comments:
Post a Comment