Last night, I went to the Regal Cinemas in Mashpee, Massachusetts to see the latest Gabriela Cowperthwaite film, I.S.S., my first 2024 release of the year. While the Regal in Mashpee isn’t the Cape Cinemas in Dennis where I can get Dos Equis, it’s still a good theater feeling. Relatively quiet, which I do like, but boy, and I don’t want to sound like a cheesy standup comedian, but what’s the deal with their soda sizes? I got a small, let me repeat, a small Diet Pepsi and they gave me the biggest cup I’ve ever witnessed that was filled to the brim with Diet Pepsi (not as good as Diet Coke) and ice. I didn’t even get through half of the drink. That’s kind of a fair warning to those who’ve never been to a Regal. If you’re getting a soda, opt for the small.
I’m getting sidetracked. Sorry.
Most of the time when I see a film in theaters, I do research. I like to know the premise, the cast, the director. All of that. But for I.S.S., I went in relatively blind. All I knew was that it takes place on the International Space Station and that Chris Messina was in it. That was it. After taking that approach, I might start doing it more often because it paid off big time with how much I enjoyed the film. It’s a claustrophobic thriller with many realistic elements and characters who display a lot of change throughout — some good, some bad.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
The Good
To kick off “The Good“, I’d like to say I was thoroughly surprised with how much I enjoyed I.S.S. Going into a film and shelving your biases isn’t an easy task, and I tried doing that with I.S.S., but the second that there was a passive aggressive tension in the air between the Americans and Russians, I was hooked. It’s like a tense family dynamic that we’ve seen in films like Noah Baumbachs Mistress America or, on a lesser level, the tension that Sidney Lumet brings in his 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. There’s underlying hostility that doesn’t come to a head until the stakes are raised where the gauntlet of taking over the station is thrown down. Cowperthwaite does a great job leading up to that moment.
Another positive of I.S.S. is the realistic nature of it. We’re watching a film that’s taking place in the present and we get that feeling from the stations’ set up. They’re not eating futuristic foods or conducting overly-advanced experiments. The astronauts are doing what we’ve seen in documentaries about astronauts. Whether it’s running on a treadmill that harnesses you in or communicating with Earth, it felt realistic, which was refreshing. Watching films about space, no matter how great they are, always feel inauthentic in their approach to life in space. Seeing I.S.S. and its realistic look at astronauts was great.
My final note of good was that the script from a dialogue stand point is crisp. There’s no awkward chatter that feels forced or corny quips. We’re watching professionals work and that’s what the dialogue centers on, even in the tensest moments. Writer Nick Shafir did an awesome job crafting discourse that flows naturally — a rarity in a lot of films that come out in this era.
The Bad
My biggest complaint of I.S.S. are the visuals. I’m not sure if tacky is the word I’d use, but they felt cheap. Every shot of Earth enduring nuclear war felt like a watered down version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. Again, I don’t want to say it’s tacky, but it lacked emotion. When you see visuals of space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’re gripped. You’re strangled by the masterful work of from the cinematographer. You don’t get that feeling here as the visuals of space felt two-dimensional. I think it’s tough to decipher feeling around a film’s visuals, but two-dimensional feels fitting.
Along with the visuals being a miss, the third act was messy. It backtracks on the compliment I wanted to give, where the fight scenes feel organic. When I saw Gordon and Nicholai get shut into the tube and fight, I slumped into my seat and groaned. Not loud enough for the other three people in the cinema to hear, but loud enough to express my disdain. It was an over-the-top fight scene contradicting my past feelings about the film’s realistic nature. The good news is that’s the only moment that doesn’t feel organic and it came in the third act.
On top of that, so much occurs in the third act that you can’t digest what happened prior. It’s as if Cowperthwaite forgot to spread out these high-stakes moments and crammed them in the film’s final thirty minutes. That effected how I felt about the pacing, which in act one and two was great. Aside from two-dimensional visuals and a messy third act which alters the films pacing, I didn’t have many issues with I.S.S. The pros outweigh the cons heavily in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s sixth film.
Performance Report Card
Ariana DeBose: B-
Even though it felt like there were three of four main characters, the center of the film was Ariana DeBose. She straddled the fence of professional poise and emotional instability so well that she never tipped her hand as to what she would do next. That added to the suspense of the plot, making I.S.S. as tense as it was. In addition, I enjoyed the layers to her character. As the film progressed, more and more was peeled back revealing reasons for both her emotional instability and professional poise.
My one gripe would be that I thought she struggled to connect with other actors in the film. I mentioned how the dialogue in Shafir’s script didn’t feel forced, but there were occasions when DeBose was conversing with another character that lacked an authentic feeling. That was my biggest issue with DeBose’s otherwise solid performance.
Chris Messina: B
After seeing Chris Messina in Air in 2023, it was nice to see him in a more subdued role. In Air he was bouncing off the walls shouting about his fucking client, Michael Jordan. In I.S.S., Messina exudes real emotion about Weronika and does flip the switch once he’s saved from dying in space from being understated to batshit crazy. And while I did like subdued Messina, the natural reaction of finding out your lover is dead and the Russians are trying to kill you is to go crazy.
Even though he’s in my least favorite scene of the film when he fights Nicholai, he does get bonus points for having a sick mustache. That’s what hoists him from a B- to a B.
Pilou Asbæk: B-
Asbæk’s stoic, emotional prowess added an uneasy feeling to the film, because a lot like DeBose, you never knew his next move. While that was an awesome quality he brought to the screen, it wasn’t his best. His best was his display of emotional turmoil he was going through. He knew that what Nicholai was doing was wrong, but he also wanted to be loyal to Russia. That dichotomy he battled was an interesting subplot to I.S.S. that I enjoyed very much.
John Gallagher Jr.: C
John Gallagher Jr. gave a fine performance. His motives were clear, but I’ll say I wasn’t taken aback when I found out that he was looking to flee the station with the vaccine that Alexey was creating. There was always a wormy trait he possessed and you saw that early on. Of all the characters, his moves seemed to be the most calculated through his emotion and facial inflictions. Like I said, he was fine.
Costa Ronin: C-
While I mentioned with Pilou Asbæk how I enjoyed him emotional silence, Costa Ronin was also silent for a lot of the film. However, he lacked any emotion. We knew his motives — to kill the Americans and take control, but there was no emotional backing. He kind of just grunted his away through the film and didn’t bring much to the table, both as an astronaut and as a character. It’s good we didn’t get much of Ronin, but less would have been better.
Maria Mashkova: B
Even though Mashkova’s character, Weronika, isn’t with us for long, she delivers a good performance. Her inclination was strong when it came to wanting to do the right thing, and a lot like when Messina realized she was dead, she reacted with an unmatched intensity towards the crew that turned into quick thinking mixed with depressing emotion. The way she could switch between different emotions was impressive, and that was my biggest takeaway from her performance.
Critical Reception
As of right now, only 1,100 Letterboxd users have seen I.S.S. and it’s earned a 3/5 star overall rating, with 9 users rating it 5/5 stars and 14 rating it 0.5/5 stars. IMDB and Metacritic are on the relatively same page when it comes to the film as IMDB gave it a 5.4/10 rating and its Metacritic score is 56%. Out of Metacritic, IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, I.S.S. is doing best on Rotten Tomatoes with a Tomatometer score of 66%.
With this being the first 2024 release I’ve seen, it has garnered the coveted number one slot on my rankings of 2024 releases. It’s also been denigrated to the last spot. One thing working in favor of I.S.S. is that 2024 does seem to be a relatively weak year for film. It’s a lot of sequels and big budget slop hitting screens in the future, but we could get surprisingly good indie films. We saw a lot of that last year, or at least I did, getting pleasantly surprised by films like Past Lives and Talk to Me.