“Stowaway” Trailer Reveals Netflix’s Mission to Mars Drama

Director Joe Penna’s upcoming film Stowaway presents an intriguing central dilemma—what do you do when a spaceship on a two-year mission to Mars with precisely enough oxygen for three people finds itself having to account for a fourth? This problem is what animates Penna’s new film, and he’s assembled a great cast to tease out its implications. Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Toni Collette, and Shamier Anderson star, working from a script from Penna and Ryan Morrison, and a new trailer from Netflix highlights the movie’s driving conundrum—how do you decide who gets to live and who must die?

Anderson plays launch support engineer Michael, the stowaway, although he didn’t hide aboard the shuttle on purpose. Rather, Michael was working on the craft before launch and got himself knocked unconscious. By the time the rest of the crew realizes he’s there, it’s too late, they’re in space. What’s worse, Michael has accidentally damaged the spaceship’s life support system, which leaves only enough oxygen for three astronauts to survive the journey to Mars. The math is brutal—either one of them has to be sacrificed, or all four will die.

Unless, perhaps, they can devise a way to tweak the life support system? Or, as the trailer seems to suggest, might they decide to forge ahead to Mars, oxygen be damned, to try and complete the mission, one way or another, despite the fact it means none of them makes it home? One has to assume that the crew only finds out about the life support system failure once it’s too late to turn back. And the film’s premise—folks trapped in a tiny space in the midst of an existential crisis—can’t help but resonate after a year’s worth of feeling much the same in real life.

Whichever way Stowaway unpacks this fretful situation, it’s got actors with the chops to make the script’s contained space and moral quandary very compelling. Stowaway premieres on Netflix on April 22. Check out the trailer below:

Here’s the synopsis from Netflix:

On a mission headed to Mars, an unintended stowaway accidentally causes severe damage to the spaceship’s life support systems. Facing dwindling resources and a potentially fatal outcome, the crew is forced to make an impossible decision.

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Featured image: STOWAWAY – TONI COLLETTE as MARINA BARNETT. Cr: © 2021, Stowaway Productions, LLC, Augenschein Filmproduktion GmbH, RISE Filmproduktion GmbH. All rights reserved.

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The Credits is an online magazine that tells the story behind the story to celebrate our large and diverse creative community. Focusing on profiles of below-the-line filmmakers, The Credits celebrates the often uncelebrated individuals who are indispensable to the films and TV shows we love.