Yeah, I know “I.S.S.” stands for “International Space Station.” But to me, it’s always going to mean “in-school suspension,” which is something I was well accustomed to from ninth grade onward.
Do they still have in-school suspension anymore? Basically, if you did something the school administrators didn’t like, they used to put you in this one room where you weren’t allowed to say anything all day and all you could do was schoolwork … in complete silence.
About five minutes into my first I.S.S. experience, something dawned on me. “Wait a minute, this is supposed to be a punishment?” I get to sit here and actually focus on my studies and learn at my own pace and I don’t have to worry about ruffians in the back of class getting into fist fights or trying to set their desks on fire?
Basically, I.S.S. was like a preview for college. You find a cubicle, you keep your yap shut and everybody around you keeps their yaps shut, too, so you can get all your schoolwork done. I liked that a lot more than the “traditional” public education model. In fact, the whole thing kind of foreshadowed what we now call “remote learning” — only without the computers. Or the internet. Or even teachers.
If I.S.S. has fallen out of fashion in the education realm, I’m guessing it probably had something to do with unions. But doesn’t it always?
Speaking of a buncha’ people with hard to decipher accents all cramped together into tight confines, our flick of the week is that aforementioned “I.S.S.,” which is about the space station and not an alternative to after-school detention (otherwise, they’d have to pay the teachers overtime, so of course that got nixed).
For those of you out of the loop, the I.S.S. is this giant outer space platform that the U.S. and Ruskies worked on together after the Cold War. I’m not really sure what the purpose of it is, unless spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars on experiments to see how weightlessness affects the dietary habits of gerbils is a national security imperative. All you need to know is that’s a real thing and it’s been up and operational for about 30 years now, and that’s pretty much all the backstory you’re going to need to get the gist of the movie.
Now, I’ve always heard that movie studios like to dump their worst movies in January, just so they can get them out of the way early and focus on those quarter two earning sheets. Well, “I.S.S.” definitely lends some credence to the theory, because this movie — well, it ain’t good.
First things first, NOTHING happens in the first 30 minutes of this movie. It’s literally just American astronauts with ponytails and Russian cosmonauts with mustaches talking about toothpaste for half an hour. Or something like that. Then we FINALLY get something resembling a plot point, as the space personnel watch a whole bunch of explosions crop up all over the planet.
Well, take a wild guess what this plot twist is. That’s right, the U.S. and Russia finally decided to exchange nukes, and it’s basically implied that these astronauts are the last survivors of their respective homelands.
That is, until they start getting radio distress calls from Moscow and Washington, letting ‘em know that it’s time to take back some hardware.
There’s some psychological stuff for a bit, with neither camp seeming all that happy to strangle everybody onboard who speaks a different language. But by the one hour mark, the screenwriters figured they had to put SOMETHING kinda’ exciting in there. Too bad the whole movie is barely an hour and 20 minutes, though.
This thing was a chore to sit through, folks. It might not be the worst movie of 2024, but it’s definitely going to be in the running for most boring. At my most generous, the best I can afford “I.S.S.” is a pitiful ONE AND A HALF PIECES OF POPCORN OUT OF FOUR rating.
Heck, I think I’d rather be reading Chaucer in detention again than watching this junk.