Math is unyielding.
No matter how desperate the circumstances, no matter how dire the situation, math won’t suddenly offer a more promising result.
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| While Michael (Shamier Anderson, far left) watches nervously, Commander Barnett (Toni Colette, far right) clarifies their mission's implacable resource limitations to Zoe (Anna Kendrick) and David (Daniel Dae Kim). |
But the core imperative remains the same: You simply can’t argue with math.
The story, set in a future when Mars has been colonized, begins as a Kingfisher rocket blasts off from Earth, under the command of Marina Barnett (Toni Colette). She’s joined by medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) and biologist/botanist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim), accomplished academics chosen from thousands of applicants who submitted proposals for Mars-based research.
They dock with the Hyperion MTS-42, a modular space station. The spent rocket is transformed into a spinning counterweight at the end of a 500-meter-long tether; this supplies artificial gravity for the months-long journey to Mars. (Very cool concept, I might add.)
Shortly after this lengthy trip begins, during routine safety checks, Marina discovers an unconscious man in an overhead compartment that contains the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA). When the body drops to the floor, his weight breaks Marina’s forearm; his safety harness, wrapped around a pipe attached to the CDRA, also inflicts damage.
Once he regains consciousness, the newcomer proves to be Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), a ground crew engineer who blacked out after injuring himself during final pre-flight checks.
(I know, I know. The notion that there wouldn’t be some sort of personnel role call prior to take-off, is rather difficult to swallow. We gotta just go with it.)
(Technically, Michael also isn’t a stowaway, since he’s present accidentally, rather than intentionally. But that really is picking nits.)
Michael initially is horrified by the implications of his plight; the MTS-42 already has traveled past the point of no return, which means he’s looking at a two-year leave from Earth. This is agonizing — and Anderson plays this quite well — because he’s the sole support for his younger sister Ava, back on Earth. Happily, Hyperion officials — reached by radio — rise to the occasion, and promise to house and support her.
At which point, Michael calmly accepts the situation, and promises to “carry his weight” to whatever degree the others can use him.
Ah, but there’s the rub.
When it eventually becomes obvious that the CDRA is beyond repair, the implacability of math rears its ugly head: Without that gadget, the oxygen supply will handle only two people, during this long journey. Indeed, even if David executes a Hail Mary play, by prematurely activating his oxygen-generating algae — the project that earned him a place on this mission — that boosts it to three.
Not four.
Penna and Morrison thus focus on the same moral quandary and philosophical debate — the unquantifiable value of one life, compared to another — that fueled Godwin’s short story. (In fairness, though, he made the stakes entirely different, the eventual decision therefore less debatable.)
The trouble, by this point, is that we like Michael. Quite a lot. Anderson makes him thoroughly sympathetic, genial and eager to please; he also exudes a trace of guilt, fully aware that he has upset the apple cart (although he doesn’t initially know to what degree). Marina, Zoe and David also like him. It’s a variant of the Stockholm syndrome; the more time they spend with Michael, the more he becomes … well … part of the crew.
Collette shades Marina in escalating degrees of mental anguish; she practically turns gray before our eyes, her body sagging beneath the weight of the decision that must be made. And yet she never loses her professionalism; indeed, everybody here adheres to training, regulations and protocol. Penna and Morrison don’t succumb to cheap melodrama; these characters never lose their cool, never scream at each other.
They work the problem, as they should.
Kendrick’s Zoe is a passionate eager beaver: excited by her place on this mission, gob-smacked by her first view of Earth from space. (David, more prone to motion sickness, can’t share her enthusiasm.) She’s therefore the most indignant about the utter “unfairness” of this catastrophe, the most unwilling to accept the math.
Kim’s David is quieter, more pragmatic. He’s also enormously possessive about his work; watching him nurse tiny algae sprouts is oddly touching.
We never meet or see any ground-based characters. Marina’s increasingly agitated chats with Hyperion’s Mission Control — most often with somebody named Jim — are entirely one-sided; we see only Collette, as she stares at a screen turned away from us, Jim’s voice patched solely to her ear buds. Our grasp of the situation’s growing severity is conveyed solely by Collette’s persuasive acting chops.
To a degree, then, this is a riff on the “man in a can” sub-genre. Until the third act, our point of view never strays from these four people, in production designer Marco Bittner Rosser’s way-cool interiors: the cramped passageways, sleeping quarters, infirmary, laboratory, exercise area and cupola, the latter allowing views of space.
Penna and Rosser have done impressively well with a modest budget. It’s also a believably “cluttered” environment, with all manner of stuff and equipment tucked into every corner.
Once we hit that third act, though, things shift radically. And the tension becomes edge-of-the-seat, heart-in-mouth unbearable.
Although their film is engaging from start to finish, Penna and Morrison’s sense of drama is superior to their grasp of hard science. Even before the oxygen crisis is exposed, no mention ever is made of how all these characters will have enough to eat. (And drink?) At one point, Michael wastes precious water by washing a shirt. (That drew a howl of protest from Constant Companion.)
Early on, David teases Zoe for “wasting” 800 grams of her allowable personal effects on two ceramic coffee mugs, yet nobody ever says boo about the unplanned impact of Michael’s 78 kilograms. (Anderson is a big, hefty guy.)
And although there’s a cute bit during the initial Kingfisher blast-off, with Zoe’s com link properly responding to g-force and lack of gravity, I’m less sanguine about the accuracy of “stuff behavior” during the third act.
Sci-fi purists likely will smirk at such lapses, but — if you get properly caught up in the story, which certainly isn’t difficult — they really don’t matter. This is an examination of implacable situations that require impossible choices.
That’s drama enough.
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