Director – Gabriela Cowperthwaite, Screenplay – Nick Shafir, Producers – Mickey Liddell & Pete Shilaimon, Photography – Nick Remy Matthews, Music – Anne Nikitin, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris LeDoux, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes, Dazzle Pictures (Supervisor – Diego Gutierrez), Golden Sky Birds, Omega Render, Onrikal Studio (Supervisor – Luis Tinoco) & Rocket Money, Special Effects Supervisor – Will Purcell, Production Design – Geoff Wallace. Production Company – Liddell Entertainment.
Cast
Ariana DeBose (Dr Kira Foster), Chris Messina (Gordon Barrett), John Gallagher Jr. (Christian Campbell), Masha Mashkova (Weronika Vetrov), Costa Ronin (Nicholai Pulov), Pilou Asbæk (Alexey Pulov)
Plot
Astronauts Dr Kira Foster and Gordon Barrett arrive to take up positions on the International Space Station, joining one other US astronaut and the three Russians already stationed there. Kira adjusts to life in micro-gravity. She is in the cupola of the station when she sees vast fires break out on Earth. They realise that there has been a massive nuclear exchange between Russia and the USA. Gordon then receives a message from Ground Control telling them that the I.S.S. is a vital asset and they are to take command of it at all costs. The satellite link then goes dead. Gordon is forced to go and perform a repair on the outside of the station. However, when he gets there, he finds nothing wrong only to be hit by the robot arm and swept away. Realising that the Russians have received the same orders to gain control of the station and that this was an act of murder, this places both factions at each other’s throat.
In recent years, Gravity (2013) proved a major box-office and critical success. It brought a newfound fascination with realistic and scientifically grounded portrayals of NASA and the Space Program. To follow would be the equal hit of The Martian (2015) and other works such as Approaching the Unknown (2016), Life (2017), The Space Between Us (2017) and Ad Astra (2019), as well as real-life based films such as Salyut 7 (2017) and First Man (2018).
Gabriela Cowperthwaite first emerged as a director with the controversial documentary Blackfish (2013) about a whale in captivity in Florida that murdered its trainer. Along with making a subsequent documentary The Grab (2022), Cowperthwaite moved to direct dramatic films with Meagan Leavey (2017) and Our Friend (2019), both true-life biographical works. I.S.S. is her first work of fiction.
There have been a spate of films about people on the I.S.S. or other space habitats who are the sole survivors as the Earth below them is obliterated. The first of these was Defcon-4 (1985), which had a group of people in a space station orbiting Earth surviving as a nuclear holocaust breaks out down below. There have been assorted variants on the subject with Love (2011), 3022 (2019), The Midnight Sky (2020) and Rubikon (2022), even a comedy treatment with the Chinese Moon Man (2022).
Chris Messina goes outside the International Space Station as the Earth burns below
I.S.S. takes the basic set-up and gives it an ingenious spin – what if one of the catastrophes that precipitate these other works had broken out on the Earth and those left aboard the I.S.S were forced to take sides and placed at each other’s throats fighting over control of the station. In some regards, it makes perfect sense for the film to have been made back in the heyday of Cold War tensions between the East and West, but it works perfectly well updated to the era of contemporary West-Russian tensions. The film wisely chooses to avoid any discussion of how the situation escalated to nuclear war.
What impresses in a major way is the degree to which the film makes an effort to look as though it really is taking place aboard the International Space Station. Not having visited there myself, I cannot say for a hundred percent certainty, but it looks as though the production designer has studied photographs and built the set in exacting detail. Like Gravity et al, Gabriela Cowperthwaite make a concerted effort to portray micro-gravity and deal with issues like sleeping in space, even appealing scenes with the crew floating to catch bubbles from an opened alcohol bottle with their mouths.
Once the tensions ramp up, I.S.S. becomes gripping. Chris Messina’s extra-vehicular journey out to repair the satellite – all against a backdrop of the Earth that has become a fiery cauldron below – comes with a great deal of tension. The plotting conducts a series of whiplash twists back and forward between what can be trusted about who says what, culminating in a series of bared to-the-death fights.
The only letdown here and in some of the other scenes is that you get the impression that the film was sometimes having to cut corners on visual effects costs – while there are some impressive exteriors, I.S.S. also lacks the limitless effects budgets that a film like Gravity had, leaving some of the exterior shots feeling hurried, or in the case of the robotic arm sequence, not getting their full dramatic due.
