Stowaway is a 2021 science fiction drama directed by Joe Penna and co-written with Ryan Morrison, released on Netflix and running 116 minutes. Toni Collette plays Commander Marina Barnett, Anna Kendrick is medical researcher Zoe Levenson, Daniel Dae Kim is botanist David Kim, and Shamier Anderson is Michael Adams, a launch support engineer who ends up aboard a two-year mission to Mars entirely by accident.

This had a really cool concept. It genuinely could have been one of those undiscovered gems that I get to spend a review enthusiastically pressing on people.

It did not get there. It missed the mark, and it missed it by an enormous distance.

And the thing I genuinely cannot move past is the panel. The man is drilled into it. Bolted in. Commander Barnett has to produce power tools in order to free him. And the film offers absolutely no account of how he came to be in there.

I want to be clear that this is not me nitpicking a small thing, because it is comfortably the most common criticism of this film. One reviewer wrote that it is very telling of the script that the audience simply has to ignore that this man was literally drilled into the wall panel. Another noted that the film never makes clear how Michael sealed himself into the ceiling, and generously described it as required hand-waving in an otherwise scientifically accurate movie. A third went considerably further, arguing that the only logical conclusion available is that somebody deliberately knocked him out and stuffed him in there, either as sabotage or because he was himself a saboteur.

And the film does gesture at that, for roughly one second, when Barnett offers an offhand remark about how Michael seems genuine. And then the matter is dropped permanently. That is the entire investigation into how a man ended up welded inside the life support system of a spacecraft bound for Mars.

It is also worse than I had registered while watching. Nobody performed a headcount before launch. Somebody sealed a service panel with an unconscious human being behind it. He was in there for over twelve hours, bleeding from a serious abdominal wound, and the first anybody knew about it was when Barnett spotted a drop of blood on the floor. Ground support personnel communicate constantly and are cleared well away from a launch vehicle before takeoff. None of this is addressed.

Which brings me to the part that annoyed me more rather than less once I understood it.