By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Peter Chelsom
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino, Janet Montgomery, BD Wong, and Britt Robertson.
Rating: Poor.
Peter Chelsom, director of “Serendipity” and “Hector and the Pursuit of Happiness” brings the drama “The Space Between Us” and this is one of the most ridiculous films I´ve seen so far in 2017.
The movie tells the story of Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield) , the first human being born on mars after her mother and astronaut Sarah Elliot (Janet Montgomery) dies after giving birth.
At 16 years old, Gardner is being raised by Kendra (Carla Gugino) and creates a distant friendship with a girl from Denver, Colorado called Tulsa (Britt Robertson).
Gardner receives the news that he is going to travel to earth where he will finally meet Tulsa and the chance of meeting his biological father. Tulsa will help him and together will do a road trip, while there on the pursuit of the former director of the launching program to Mars Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman).
The main problem begins when Gardner´s body begins to suffer changes when he is on earth and he´s stay in the planet is in jeopardy. Now he is in a race against time to find his own identity before it´s too late.
I felt this movie was a clear rip off of John Carpenter´s “Starman” released in 1984. The plot is very similar but honestly it didn´t work.
The writing by Allan Loeb, who wrote last year´s “Collateral Beauty” which became one of the major flops in box office, was written poorly.
The dialogue of the characters is on the nose and I have to say that movie had an interesting start but everything afterwards went down to the drain.
The movie goes to the point that becomes boring and honestly it lost me.
The execution of when Gardner arrives to earth could have been written in a better way with more progressive complications but I didn´t see that. I only saw pursuit against the kid all the time and the movie resulted on being to predictable.
The cast overacted so much and they were trying to make a huge effort to us to believe them but I was never convinced.
I do think “The Space Between Us” could have had potential but the moment I begin to see things that were having an exact resemblance to “Starman” that´s when I stopped caring.
Peter Chelsom´s directing was all over and he tried to focused only in the visuals and not the acting of the film.
Asa Butterfield and of course Gary Oldman who I´ve always enjoyed watching a movie that he´s in, but here both actors were not well directed.
Peter Chelsom had very good elements of directing a good movie but this wasn´t the case and I hope this is a good learning experience for him.
The Space Between Us” is one the year´s most dissapointing and I cannot recommend it.