One star. Rated PG-13, and needlessly, for minor sensuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang
This film isn’t merely bad; it’s
impressively, defiantly awful.
The silliest TV soap operas
aren’t this eye-rollingly overwrought.
The acting is wildly uneven. The
writing is dreadful. The direction is beyond clumsy. The use of music — and the
score itself — are thunderously flamboyant. The applications of science — this
is, after all, a futuristic adventure — are repeatedly, recognizably faulty.
I’ve never seen a film with such
a brazen display of grandiosity, as if every artificially portentous, laughably
embroidered line of dialog deserved to be chiseled as the 11th Commandment.
My mental warning klaxon began
shrieking 30 seconds into the very first scene: a press conference led by
Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman), founder of Genesis Space Technologies, who
intends to solve Earth’s many geological, climate-induced and socio-political
crises by establishing a human settlement on Mars. (As if spending gazillions
to eventually put a few dozen people on Mars would mitigate such issues?)
Oldman, in by far the worst
performance of his lengthy career, puts such pompous weight onto each syllable,
that I’d not have been surprised if a celestial choir had descended from the
heavens.
Shepherd introduces the
six-person crew, led by mission head Sarah Elliot (Janet Montgomery); they
field a few questions and then board the rocket that whisks them to the
orbiting Genesis Magellan-61 spacecraft, for their months-long journey to the
Red Planet.
Shortly into this trip, Sarah is
discovered to be pregnant.
We pause, for the first of many
reality checks:
Head of the mission, the
public-relations fate of an entire corporation on her shoulders, and Sarah imprudently
has unprotected sex shortly before she departs for Mars? Given that she’s the
only woman in the crew, that’s not merely narratively stupid; it’s a grossly
insulting and sexist contrivance on the part of scripters Allan Loeb, Stewart
Schill and Richard Barton Lewis. And it’s merely the first of countless,
groaningly awful plot hiccups.
Please, somebody: Take away their
keyboards before they commit writing again.
To continue...
The team reaches Mars, sets up an
impressively large and fully functional habitat in record time — it’s simply
there, one moment to the next, like a fait
accompli — and then Sarah dies in childbirth. Flash-forward 16 years later,
and the boy has grown into a strapping teenager: Gardner (Asa Butterfield), who
has a flair for computers, gadgets and all things technical. No surprise there;
he was raised by scientists.
We can but ponder how the infant
was kept alive, during his first few years, and under such harsh — and uncharted
— conditions. The script simply doesn’t go there.
The habitat has grown, as has its
population; Genesis has been rotating astronauts on a regular basis. Current
mission engineer Kendra Wyndham (Carla Gugino) has become something of an
adoptive parent for Gardner, trying to keep his rebellious streak in check ...
such as breaking 17 layers of essential safety protocol while taking a
multi-million-dollar research buggy on a joy ride, and crashing it into a
Martian sandbank.
Gosh, teenagers are so silly!
Back on Earth, Gardner’s very
existence has been kept a classified secret by Shepherd and his high-level
Genesis colleagues, all of them terrified that the resulting bad publicity
might impair ongoing funding. The notion that a whole human being could be
successfully concealed for so long, amid so many comings and goings, and photo/video
feeds, is patently ludicrous. But, well, anyway...
Unbeknownst to all (Gardner
assumes), for quite some time he has been enjoying online chats with Tulsa
(Britt Robertson), a Colorado-based high school girl. She’s street-smart and
precocious, and has a chip on her shoulder the size of, well, Colorado: anger
issues resulting from her having been shunted through various indifferent
foster parents.
But wait, you say: Online chats? Instantaneous online chats, as if these
two wild ’n’ crazy kids lived next door to each other?
Even grade-school students know
better. Depending on planetary alignment, radio signals require between three
and 21 minutes to travel between Mars and Earth. Goodness, we all were reminded
of this quite recently, in 2015’s rigorously scientific The Martian. So, what: We’re supposed to believe in some sort of
magic, warp-generating relay stations? (This issue actually crops up earlier,
when Shepherd watches a “live” video feed as Sarah dies on the makeshift
operating table.)
Moving on...
Gardner decides that he wants to
meet Tulsa (who has no clue where he actually lives). Bad idea, Genesis doctors
insist; the kid’s bones and circulatory system, conditioned to life on Mars,
couldn’t handle Earth’s greater gravity pull. Well, whatever; this lame-brain
script says it’s gotta happen, so it happens, thanks to implanted enhancements
that strengthen Gardner’s limbs.
Somehow, despite the length of
time required to prep for, endure and recover from this massively invasive
surgical procedure, necessitating weeks (months?) of post-operative therapy, and
the crucial exercises and building of physical stamina, followed by a
seven-month trip to Earth ... Tulsa is still
in the same high school classroom when Gardner finally reaches her.
Of course, he doesn’t land on her
doorstep. No, his shuttle touches down at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center (futuristically
— and niftily — enhanced by production designer Kirk M. Petruccelli and visual
effects supervisor Robert Bock). Gardner easily evades what we have to assume
would be the world’s tightest security and monitoring technology — at which
point our eyes, no longer able to roll, simply pop out of their sockets — and
embarks on a road trip to Colorado.
Aside from meeting Tulsa, Gardner
also wants to find his birth father, known only as a face in a short video
found among Sarah’s personal effects.
Shepherd and Kendra — the latter
having accompanied Gardner on his trip to Earth — are close behind, thanks to
the availability of pervasive monitoring technology. Along the way, Shepherd
constantly bellows, blathers and bloviates like a demented refugee from the
nearest lunatic asylum. I’m surprised Oldman doesn’t foam at the mouth.
Oh, and it should be mentioned
that there’s no evidence of any of the many environmental crises that Shepherd pontificates
about, in this film’s opening sermon. Frankly, as Gardner takes a bus across
the country, everything looks just peachy-keen beautiful.
There’s no need to go any
further, although rest assured: The story continues to be relentlessly
imbecilic. But wait, there’s more: All of these melodramatic contrivances are
further overstated by Andrew Lockington’s laughably baroque, sturm und drang score, which is pumped
at maximum volume by director Peter Chelsom, who apparently worried that
Oldman’s performance was too dainty.
I see that Chelsom also was
responsible for one of the previous decade’s worst comedies: the 2001 Warren
Beatty/Charlton Heston/Diane Keaton/Goldie Hawn debacle, Town & Country. I’m not surprised.
Lockington’s overblown orchestral
underscore is bad enough; the randomly inserted pop and folk tunes, once
Gardner gets to Earth, are even worse. These mostly gawpy songs aren’t merely
intrusive; they’re ineptly placed. They frequently elicited derisive — and
well-deserved — snickers from Wednesday evening’s sparse preview audience.
Which, by the way, also giggled
mercilessly at Oldman’s appalling behavior.
Butterfield, Robertson and
Gugino, bless their hearts, try hard to deliver sincere performances; Butterfield’s
wide-eyed innocence, as Gardner takes in Earth’s various surprises — such as
dogs and horses — is sweetly endearing. These three actors save this mess from full-blown
turkeydom.
Which still is damning with very
faint praise. The writing was on the wall last summer, when this film’s
original mid-August release was postponed to mid-December, and then bumped
again to today’s mid-winter dumping ground. The
Space Between Us is a pathetic embarrassment for all concerned, and
particularly disappointing for sci-fi fans, who deserve much better.
No comments:
Post a Comment