Rating: R | Runtime: 95 minutes
Release Date: January 19th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Bleecker Street Media
Director(s): Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Writer(s): Nick Shafir

Here we’re one.

It’s a solid premise. Especially now. Americans and Russians work in partnership on the International Space Station while tensions continue to rise on Earth between the two superpowers. You don’t have to be caught up on “For All Mankind” to know that the scenario is ripe for implosion. So, when newcomer Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) sees explosions outside the window, the initial fear about what’s happening back home is quickly replaced by anxiety for what’s about to happen in space.

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s I.S.S. does well to give us some time with the six characters in Nick Shafir’s script to try and get a handle on who they are. Kira is our surrogate—a stranger learning with us. Gordon (Chris Messina) is the American commander with Nicholai (Costa Ronin) serving as his Russian counterpart—both genial and firm, but fair. Nika (Masha Mashkova) is the friendliest face of them all—helped by the fact she and Gordon are obviously a “thing”. Alexey (Pilou Asbæk) is the unfriendliest face—laconic and temperamental. And Christian (John Gallagher Jr.) is the wild card—kind, but with a dark undercurrent.

We therefore hatch our preconceptions about who will want to work together with the trust that has been built and who will put duty over experience once orders to take control of the space station “by any means necessary” come over the wire. Will a love affair be enough to ignore a directive? Will trust only end up exposing naïveté? How far will either side go to secure their own survival at the cost of their soul? Add an as yet unknown component of the research being done and those you don’t think capable of horrors might just catch you off-guard … and vice versa.

I say “might” because there isn’t anything on-screen that you haven’t seen before. If anything, Shafir and Cowperthwaite merely delay expectations rather than subvert them. And that’s fine. We’re here to be entertained and perhaps shaken awake by the very real possibility of nuclear war and the many ways one’s impact would be felt in the twenty-first century as opposed to the Cold War era. You’d like to think cooler heads would prevail between “enemies” that were friends just a second earlier, but fearmongering is a powerful political indoctrination tool.

The film honors its performances as far as never letting anyone fall so far out of character that you don’t believe what’s happening—a crucial necessity considering everything must stay grounded to maintain our investment in the stakes. So, while the beats are obvious and the tension often fabricated to the point of becoming inert, DeBose, Asbæk, and the others lend the action an honesty that elevates the material beyond simple A-to-B trajectories. It probably won’t leave too much of a lasting impression, but it serves its purpose as a ninety-minute diversion.

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Ariana DeBose in I.S.S.; courtesy of Bleecker Street.