'I.S.S.' review:  Interesting premise, but poor execution dooms Ariana DeBose space drama

It’s all one big youth hostel on the International Space Station, at least according to “I.S.S.,” Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s action thriller. Whizzing around Earth, three American and three Russian astronauts put aside their differences, play friendly games of chess, crack jokes at each other’s expense and smooth out any rough edges with a bottle of booze. Politics is a forbidden subject; as one character puts it, “we sure as hell don’t talk about what’s going on down there.”

That detente is shattered when war breaks out on Earth — and suddenly, what’s going on down there is no longer so easy to ignore.

From that compact little premise there ought to follow a tightly constructed thriller, with the famous space station acting as a pressure cooker on the increasingly paranoid humans trapped inside. Thanks to an unsteady script by Nick Shafir and somewhat stiff direction from Cowperthwaite, however, “I.S.S.” feels like it’s barely breathing for its short, 95-minute life span.

Ariana DeBose plays Dr. Kira Foster, a scientist who brings her mice and a button-down attitude to the I.S.S. where she meets a fairly jolly crew. The other Americans are Christian Campbell (John Gallagher,Jr.), a divorced dad, and Gordon Barrett (Northport's Chris Messina), the station’s confident commander. The Russians are Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova), who seems flinty and friendly at the same time, and the two Pulov brothers, Alexey (Pilou Asbaek) and Nicholai (Costa Ronin).

When things go south on Earth, “I.S.S.” ought to go into overdrive. Instead, it starts wobbling on its axis. Some characters get up to unsubtle mischief like snipping communication wires and blaming antenna malfunctions, while others formulate elaborate schemes that go (predictably) awry. Still others try to send secret signals — Russian proverbs, rhythmic knocking — that any dunderhead could easily decode. The more the movie tries to be clever, the clumsier it gets.

In a passable-enough cast, the weakest link, oddly, is DeBose, who never livens up her tightly wound character. No matter what bloody mayhem is breaking out, no matter what horrifying truth is beginning to dawn, DeBose’s Foster remains implacable, almost emotionless. (You could say she’s a little spaced out.) At one point, while choking the life out of an opponent, she wears a faintly misty expression, as if recalling a childhood pet. This is a pretty poor use of an actor who won an Oscar for playing the spitfire Anita in 2021’s “West Side Story.”

By the time “I.S.S.” crawls to its finish, you’ll won’t much care who betrayed who or whether anyone will make it out alive. In space, no one can hear you yawn.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman