Stowaway (2021) - Movie Review

The sophomore feature from Mystery Guitar Man turned budding filmmaker Joe Penna is an amplification of everything that went into his first film Arctic. The main cast has been doubled, the dialogue has increased exponentially, and while the setting is ostensibly far more cramped than the vastness of the Arctic, it serves as ground zero for a survival narrative that delves even further into dissecting human instincts. The result of all this is a film so refined, it retroactively makes Arctic look like splashing around in a kiddie pool by comparison.

Arctic (2019) - Movie Review

Maybe it’s because of my own origins as a YouTuber, but I always get a kick out of seeing someone from that sector of the Internet making it onto the big screen. It doesn’t always turn out for the best, and there’s definitely something to be said about YouTube stars getting brought into productions just for name value, but as someone who has also been trying to turn my extended hobby into something legitimate (stop laughing), it fills me with a sense of comradery. And this film is part of that legacy, coming from writer/director Joe Penna, AKA MysteryGuitarMan, one of the old guard of the YouTube scene and someone who has been chipping away at the short film grindstone for a while now. His feature-length debut, if nothing else, shows him as a cinematic creative who knows his shit.