Space: the final frontier, as the line goes, stands as a testament to the last unexplored territory for humanity, but it just as often serves as the final resting place of its pioneers. Those same starry plains full of hope and promise can quickly become a prison with no escape. You might even say space, by its very definition, has always been a prison. Instead of metal bars it has a vacuum. Instead of solitary confinement, an endless black void. Even as a simple setting it often becomes a central character because of its potential for merciless, terrifying destruction.

It’s been so often represented as a place of adventure and possibility in part because it always harbors the potential for death. This is what I love about films set in space, particularly those of the horror or science fiction variety – they take full advantage of its sinister potential. Although, even a space film that’s historical or romantic is instantly elevated when the vast and menacing blanket of space surrounds its narrative. Damien Chazelle’s haunting biopic of Neil Armstrong, First Man (2018), and Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary, Apollo 11 (2019), offered different and mesmerizing sides of the same coin, particularly Armstrong’s perilously close-call landing on the moon as fuel reserves were just seconds away from running out. Although space as prison isn’t just a convenient metaphor in cinema, it’s often literal. There is a small subgenre of space films that double down on the space as prison theme: the prison in space film.