There are no xenomorphs dripping acid in Netflix’s upcoming movie Stowaway starring Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, and Toni Collette. There’s no insane computer, no deadly microbes, and no need to use your poop to grow potatoes. All it takes is one unlucky extra person on your shuttle to be faced with a nightmare.
Stowaway’s premise is simple enough: A launch support engineer named Michael (Shamier Anderson) somehow gets knocked out on the space shuttle, taking a three-person crew to Mars, as it launches. According to the official movie synopsis, he “accidentally causes severe damage to the spaceship’s life support systems,” and as a result, there’s only enough oxygen for three people to make it to the red planet. Either someone dies, or all four of them will.
The trailer makes it seem like the crew — Anna Kendrick as Zoe, the ship’s Doctor, Daniel Dae Kim as a biologist named Kim, and Toni Collette as Marina, the ship’s commander — refuses to go back to Earth because they’ve worked too hard to turn back now, but there better be a much better reason for them to kill another human being. Maybe they’re on a mission of vital importance of some kind when it comes to exploring Mars?
I thought maybe the ship would be too far away from Earth so that going to Mars would be their only option, but if the engineer woke up 12 hours after launch and broke the life support system by getting jostled around behind that panel he falls out of, then surely it would be easier for the shuttle to just head back home. I’m pretty confident that’s what NASA would prefer instead of news headlines about how their astronauts murdered someone simply because they didn’t want to reschedule.
We’ll find out more when Stowaway hits Netflix on April 22.