I.S.S. takes all the oxygen out of the space survival thriller

polygon.com:

It’s only been a little over 10 years since Alfonso Cuarón’s space-disaster survival adventure Gravity made a huge, Oscar-winning splash with a story that takes place almost entirely in a zero-gravity setting, leaving Sandra Bullock and George Clooney bobbing around like balloons throughout most of the action. At the time, the visuals seemed shocking and attention-grabbing, enough to spark an extensive wave of “How did they do that?” technical pieces focusing solely on the zero-gravity effects.

It’s a mark of how far special effects have come in the past decade that similar effects can now be used in a movie as small and pedestrian as I.S.S., another space-set thriller centering on the International Space Station and dealing with some similar survival issues, along with some new ones. The movie is openly designed to be the next Gravity, or at least the next version of Netflix’s sci-fi downer Stowaway. Anchored by recent Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose (Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, and star of Disney’s Wish) and full of lurking danger and lethal combat, I.S.S. seems at every turn like a movie designed to keep viewers on the edge of their seats, guessing at the characters’ motives and wondering, once the conflict starts, who might die next.

And yet the movie is a tepid botch on pretty much every level. DeBose stars as Dr. Kira Foster, a biologist joining the crew on the International Space Station to work on experiments in artificial organ growth, for personal reasons eventually laid out in a brief, flat monologue. When she arrives, she finds she’s sharing the station with three Russian cosmonauts and two other Americans, all collegiate, cheery types who’ve long since figured out how to smooth the rough edges off their relationships with easy jokes and strong boundaries. They’re sharing a closed, limited environment where privacy is mostly notional, and it’s important to get along. The primary rule they live by: No talking about politics. What