Friday, June 2, 2017

The Space Between Us Gets Lost In Space

How come more of these romantic dramas aren’t from a female perspective? Like, any person of any gender can enjoy a romantic movie but these particular movies do have a notable female fanbase and are typically marketed towards women, not to mention that the most famous of these features (The Notebook, Twilight and The Fault In Our Stars for instance) are told through the prism of women. It’s kind of odd to me then that so many of these movies go for an overtly male perspective that relegates women to the sidelines as thinly sketched romantic interest material. Wouldn’t you be better served getting a woman as the face of the project and tying the premise into issues facing specifically women instead of treating your target audience as just a poorly defined object for your male protagonist to covet?


This is a long-winded way of saying that a dude gets to headline The Space Between Us, a romantic drama that actually starts off with an interesting high-concept premise that devolves into laughably bad mush, the kind of awfully made feature with obviously cheap sets, props and editing that you really don’t see get a major theatrical push anymore. I’d call it a miracle, but miracles are supposed to be cool and The Space Between Us is just tedious. The potentially intriguing high-concept premise the whole movie centers itself on is that Gardener (Asa Butterfield) is a boy who is the son an astronaut who gave birth to him in space.

His ma died in childbirth so Gardener has been stuck on the planet his mother was headed for; Mars. Here, a group of scientists have built up a colony here where Gardener calls home. He has very little contact with the outside world, with his primary form of non-Mars communication being limited to his chats with an 18-year-old girl (Britt Robertson). When he gets the chance to come to Earth, he escapes the clutches of a NASA higher-up played by Gary Oldman (who doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly evil to him) and meets up with his Earth-bound crush. What follows is Gardener acting like a total creep in attempting to woo his Earthling lover, stealing a ton of cars to the point of borderline self-parody and boning in the Grand Canyon.

The Space Between Us is one of those movies that seems to know what it wants but has no clue how to get to what it wants on a story level. For instance, it wants Gardener to be totally socially inept on Earth and not know what anything is, but they push this to such a heightened degree that he makes Buddy The Elf on his first day in New York City look like an experienced New Yorker. It’s understandable that he might not be accustomed to gravity but why would he be so bad at basic social functions? The scientists he interacts with on Mars are totally normal people, he’s not living with a bunch of Drax’s for Christs sake! Him living with scientists his whole life makes it even bamboozling why he’s somehow socially inept on Earth and not know what anything is, but they push this to such a heightened degree that he makes Buddy The Elf on his first day in New York City look mildly out of place. It’s understandable that he might not be accustomed to gravity but why would he be so bad at basic social functions? The scientists he interacts with on Mars are totally normal people, he’s not living with a bunch of Drax’s for Christs sake! Him living with scientists his whole life makes it even bamboozling why he’s somehow oblivious as to what an eye cleaning station is.

The clumsily handled fish-out-of-water element of Gardener’s character being played for awkwardly unfunny laughs is just one way the terrible script in The Space Between Us fails its protagonist. Once he arrives on Earth, Gardener cannot stop talk in supposedly poetic witticisms that are aiming to be this generation’s “Love means never having to say your story” but land closer to being this generation’s equivalent to the similarly clumsy and super unromantic erotic animal crackers sequence in Armageddon. His dialogue is anemic, his reaction to Earth culture makes zero sense and is the complete opposite of funny and Asa Butterfield…oh God, Asa Butterfield.

I liked Butterfield in Hugo, so I hope he gets a better project to headline in the future, I have a hunch he’s got some serious talent here. But he’s channeling Hayden Christensen in the Star Wars prequels here in his anemic performance. He’s rigid not in a way that conveys him being unfamiliar with his surroundings but rather rigid in a way that takes you out of the movie and wonder why Butterfield can’t just relax when he’s on-set. His dialogue delivery is particularly poor here with an intended-to-be emotional sequence where he abandons the only mother figure in his life (played by Carla Gugino) getting all of its potential emotional impact eliminated by the way Butterfield clumsily delivers his dialogue. Why is he talking in such a hurried manner here? Why does he sound so petulant instead of hurt? What is even going on here?


Asa Butterfield also has zero chemistry with Britt Roberston, who isn’t awful per se here, she just doesn’t have much to do here beyond keep a blue dress surprisingly spotless whilst she romps around in a New Mexico desert. Both she and Butterfield just look lost throughout more than anything as they struggle to get a handle on the absolutely terrible dialogue they’ve been handed. Similarly subpar is the green screen work on the windows of driving cars that can be seen in any of the movies many driving scenes or even in a late in the game space-set sequence. The VFX compositing here looks like it belongs in a 2011 Smosh video at best, not in a theatrically released movie that has employed the talents of Gary freaking Oldman.  Poor Gary Oldman. If The Space Between Us is the best work we can offer of an actor of his caliber, then that’s a really sad state of affairs. Also disheartening is that such a dreadful motion picture like The Space Between Us exists, a movie more painful than any tortured break-up.

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