ISS (2023) - Earth not only thing to set on fire

The waiting is finally over ISS (2023) I wanted to watch it because form the trailer it sound very interesting but I know this was not easy to pull off, think about it they are up there and all of the sudden Earth goes wild nuking each other countries between Russia and USA, they are up there thousand of miles from Earth without communication and all they got were their last orders to take over the International Space Stations control no matter what.

I was expecting they were going to elaborate more into the disaster that went down on Earth but all there was a sea of fire, nukes explosions where very tiny, probably if they had exaggerated explosions it would be more interesting, if some how the station was affected by what was going down would add to the drama but they didn't, they went with the most risky idea to develop the movie and it was four people floating around, not really sure on what and how to take control of the space station. This is not a movie for theaters in my opinion, my motivation is not to be hurtful although is a below average movie that I will only watch once and probably never again, not for theaters neither.

After knowing what was going to happen during the movie based on the trailer , the scenario is set for murder at the ISS after the Earth starts burning up from all the Nukes, this shot got me thinking some one was going to start dismembering people up there and the camera CCTV camera scenes are perfect for this, it gives that vibe that someone is watching you, although they never categorize this movie as terror or horror so it was my fault to think this way, if they would have done that probably be a totally different movie, imagine a murder chasing you in a close space a guy so savage or big and strong after you and all you can do is try to find where to hide but they didn't go this route.

One of the few things that the movie gets right is probably show how tight could be the space at a space station, different that we are use to watch on Sci-Fi movies where space stations are large with a lot of compartments on ISS is different, probably they want to related to in real life ISS, during the movie they mention there are many tours online, I will probably download one of this videos and watch it with VR headset. They could have use this in the persecution scenes, it feels like they try when Kira and Christian were trying to hide from Nicholai.

Part of the drama around the movie is that the Russian crew was very Russian, what I mean by this is that they are proud about their ways, culture and language contrary to their North American team mates, Alexey seem to always had difference with Gordon defending his believes, I like this part too but again something they didn't exploit; this could have help set more the tone of the drama but when the time came expecting them to go savage mode on each other trying to take over the station they just became docile and some didn't even took sides.

What conflict with this is that even though they were trying to express their ways Alexey and Weronica felt very American and Nicholai felt like he barely did anything but was the one who follow orders and did try to take over the station.

I know that the movie is not about World War III but a little context would not help, we are living on the same planet the movie takes place so either before of after, I would prefer before everything goes down but I guess they didn't have enough budget to include more scenarios like control center at Earth, after all this is reportedly a $13 million budget movie, sad but true this amount of budgets are thrown around in the industry on a daily bases to produce content that most of they time they know the quality and output.

Most of the fight scenes felt the same, since they are in space and anything damage the structure of the space station as seen on other movies the entire thing can end up destroy or a big part of it so any damage to the structure there is no reverse specially now that they have no support from Earth so just like this scene with Weronica, it felt the same "I'm going to hit, I will do it, don't tempt me", when finally the moment comes and a fight happen it had so little action because lack of gravity, they should have include gravity and things would be different, as any other human when they try to move in zero gravity environment it looks and feels slow making all this scenes look boring.

I really don't know if to be disappointed about this movie, probably when you go to the theater to watch it you do because you spend your time and money on it, although now days we do that even at home, in the past there have been productions with few actors in a close environment where actors manage to make it a success, script also has to be on point since you don't have many places to go, film or anything else to watch so its just a small room and two or three actors scene after scene, the most recent one I remember watching was The Patient a TV Mini Series with Steve Carell who plays a serious role instead of what we are more use to from him which is comedy. ISS I think had a cast that could do this with actors like Chriss Messina, Masha Maskova and Pilou Asbaek but for factors that are not common like constantly floating around, taking away liberty of movement to the characters the movie felt weird, scenes felt different for example when someone is bleeding, I think it was a big risk that didn't pay off.

I can not say this is the worst movie I have ever seen but it was very disappointing, at least I manage to finish the movie without been that bored, there were small spikes of excitement but very little ones, at some point I did wanted to pause but I was already in and also wanted to put out a review, so may be a regular viewer would not act the same and just shut it down, I cant recommend this movie and the only reason I give it a 6/10 is because I manage to finish it, similar to The Beekeeper, probably a one time watch movie and might not remember it in a few months, got a few good things but I almost didn't finish both.