K-SCORE: 28
Director: Peter Chelsom
Writer: Allan Loeb
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino
Spoiler Level: Major
The Space Between Us is trying to be cute, what with its constant monologues about love and family and how everyone should say what they really feel all the time because then everyone would be happy. It wants its reviewers to write something about how it takes a boy born on another planet to show us what it really means to be human. And if this film were written by middle schoolers, it might almost pull that off. But it’s not. It’s written by a guy who wrote The Switch, the white supremacy film 21, and Wall Street: Money Never Beefs. It’s directed by the guy who directed Underworld: Serendipity. Thus, it’s pretty pathetic.
In the space between us there is something red.
In a short span of time, our heroes break out of two hospitals, steal three cars and a plane, food, clothing, and assorted gear, stow away in a truck, blow up a building, trespass on private property, and camp without a license. There are no repercussions. Mostly they’re on a mission to find the martian kid’s father and to do that they spend the entirety of the film running from his father. It’s a bitter irony. A non-doctor non-astronaut commandeers a space shuttle to subject a kid dying of cardiovascular issues to the dangerous g-forces associated breaking the confines of the Earth’s gravity. The characters in this film, for the most part, are leaders and shapers of technological development, and astropioneering. This is a bleaker version of our future than what is depicted in The Hunger Games, where children are literally killed for sport.
It’s a boring film to watch. You can tell after the initial idea of having a child born on Mars that the creators really had no idea what to do. Most everything shown on Earth could have been scraped without any impact to the plot. At one point Gardner, the hero, talks about how “uncool” Thomas Edison was and then pulls an emergency chemical wash machine in a science classroom. He was raised by scientists! The only thing he should have been familiar with was their practices. But you don’t even really think about it because the scene has no purpose in the larger context of the plot.