[rating=2.00]
I don’t know what it is about Asa Butterfield’s character, Gardner, in The Space Between Us, a kid who’s born on Mars, that makes it so impossible to care about him. Playing off themes of adolescent alienation, something almost everyone can identify with, but forced into contrived situations of ham-handed drama, Gardner’s character utterly fails to really make a connection with the audience, thus never giving us the motivation to valiantly cheer on his increasingly implausible adventures.
After a brief and wholly unnecessary opening scene of a flight crew headed to Mars for an extended mission, it’s revealed that one of the astronauts aboard is pregnant. It then keeps jumping forward in time to manufacture some controversy as to how a pregnancy slipped past an interplanetary aptitude test, before showing Gardner’s birth, and a gratuitous attempt to exploit his mother’s death.
Flash-forward yet again to the film’s present day. Gardner is a moody, isolated teenager who lives among the rest of the astronauts on Mars. Due to the aforementioned manufactured controversy, his entire existence has been hidden from the public, so it’s like no one knows he exists, man!
Aside from Gardner’s equally charmless robot friend, and Kendra (Carla Gugino), the only person he can really open up to is Tulsa (Britt Robertson), who he regularly video chats with. Gardner has to hide the fact that he’s on Mars, but nonetheless promises how the two of them will meet in person one day.
Anyway, Gardner ends up coming to Earth, which we’re told his too dangerous an environment for him to stay in long-term, given he’s used to less oppressive gravity of the red planet. Still, he’s plucky and determined, so he escapes from his holding facility and heads off to meet Tulsa, who’s mad at him for not chatting with him online during the weeks he spent traveling to Earth in secret.
Oh, and Tulsa has a terrible life with an alcoholic father, too, because this movie can’t help from being one predictable cliché after another. Once Gardner convinces her he’s sorry (which takes all of, like, 11 seconds), the two of them take off on their cross-country road-trip to find out the truth about Gardner’s father, presumably because it was the next chapter in the beginner’s guide to schmaltzy filmmaking.
It seems like The Space Between Us wants to evoke the same kind of Spielberg-era swashbuckling adventure, the kind that’s safe for the 10-and-up set; a grounded rehashing of movies like D.A.R.Y.L. or Flight Of The Navigator. A place powered by nostalgia, where accessible, kid-friendly fantasies set the stage for a warm-hearted morality tale that lets us know we’re all different, and that’s okay. Or that we’re all the same, and that’s okay. Either way, everyone can be themselves, because we’re all okay.
The non-stop, eye-rolling clichés aside, Butterfield fails to connect with either his character or the audience. It’s almost as if he’s too good at portraying alienation, which could also explain the void between him and Robertson where the chemistry would normally go.
Ultimately, The Space Between Us is simply an unremarkable, 80s-tinged paint-by-numbers lark, one that fails to evoke any emotional reaction while it’s happening, or leave any worthwhile impression when it ends.
However, in all fairness, it does have a scene where a biplane crashes into a barn, causing it to go up in a comically oversized fireball, so at least it’s not all bad.
The Space Between Us is now playing in theaters everywhere.
