I.S.S. goes from hopeful to hopeless in the blink of an eye.

The sci-fi thriller, set aboard the International Space Station, lets the audience live vicariously through the eyes of its newest resident, Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), who reports for her first mission on the laboratory orbiting the Earth.

As she floats onto the zero-gravity station for the first time, we learn as she does how to anchor yourself and your belongings as you work or rest, and we see the glorious sight of our home planet from the vantage point of low-Earth orbit, and we are as overwhelmed as Foster at first.

We also meet the multi-national team of scientists-slash-astronauts aboard the station: Americans Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina) and Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr.), and Russians Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova), Nicholasi Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Alexey Pulov (Pilou Asbæk). And at first, the camaraderie between the two nations represented on board makes Foster – and the audience – believe that the Cold War was long, long ago.

But no sooner does Foster settle in and begin her work than all that cooperation disintegrate. Foster is the first to see something amiss – while gazing at the Earth, she sees one, two, then three explosions below. Are they volcanoes? As the rest of the crew looks on, they, and we, realize that this is a man-made disaster, and it’s spreading.

Soon, the surface of the Earth is engulfed in flames, and it’s not long before the formerly peaceful, politically-neutral atmosphere of the I.S.S. is shattered. The commanding officer on each side recieves one last transmission from Earth: gain control of the I.S.S. by any means necessary.

What happens next is both predictable and yet still suspenseful, as we wonder if the personal alliances between the cosmonauts and astronauts will hold, and if not, when and how will they break. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite uses the narrow confines of the space station, which offers virtually no privacy (every so often, she cuts to the security camera view, letting us know those on board are always being surveilled) to ratchet up the tension between the warriors and the peaceniks of the crew. While the audience can try to guess who is willing to put friendship over their loyalty to their country, they may not be correct, as those loyalties can be changed.

The cast, especially Oscar-winner DeBose and Mashkova as the only other female scientist on board, are uniformly excellent in the movie, although Nick Shafir’s script relies too heavily on simple miscommunication to drive the plot. The astronauts and cosmonauts – and we, the audience, are never told why it’s so important to wrest control of the I.S.S. away from the other country.

Most of the excitement in watching I.S.S. comes from watching a familiar story (a battle of us vs. them) play out in an exotic location. The cast was not really in space, of course – the zero-gravity effects were achieved with harnesses and tethers that held the actors suspended over the course of the 32-day shoot. But the results are real enough to make the suspension of disbelief easy.

But that excitement only goes so far. As the destruction of the Earth continues, and the friends-turned-foes fighting aboard the I.S.S. duke it out, the fate of humanity itself seems doomed, and it becomes apparent that however the film ends, it won’t be a happy one.

Even so, I.S.S. is worth a trip to the theater, if only for the chance to feel like you’re in outer space. Go while you still can.