The Space Between Us

The Space Between Us calls out for a light touch.  It should be joyous, filled with hope, and maybe make us shed a tear by the end.  But the tone of the movie ends up being curiously quiet and muted, save for a few scenes that go for heavy-handed melodrama.  You can see the cast making the effort to bring life to this material up on the screen, but the leaden tone won't let them.  And when you have Gary Oldman in your cast, and he can't even manage to lift this thing up, you know you're in trouble.

The premise is intriguing.  It's about a young man named Gardner (Asa Butterfield) who was born during an expedition to colonize Mars.  His mother (Janet Montgomery) was the lead astronaut on the mission, and apparently told no one that she was pregnant.  She died in childbirth, and so Gardner has spent his entire life living on Mars, being raised by the other scientists on the mission.  The head of the program (Oldman) thought about bringing the child back to Earth after he was born, but apparently he may not be physically strong enough to survive the journey, or possibly not be able to survive in Earth's gravity.  So, Gardner has remained a secret of NASA in order to avoid bad publicity.  Now at age 16, Gardner wants to go to Earth so that he can visit his friend - a high school girl named Tulsa (Brit Robertson) whom he talks to regularly through on line communication.  Because apparently you can have flawless Internet video chats between Earth and Mars with no connection problems whatsoever.

It's not explained how Gardner and Tulsa met.  All we know is that she doesn't know his story.  She thinks he's a sick but wealthy boy who's locked away in a Park Avenue penthouse, never allowed to go outside.  They're both misunderstood.  He doesn't have anyone to talk to except for his robot butler, and she's bullied and doesn't feel like she fits in.  Gardner does have a mother figure on the Mars colony in one of the scientists working on the project (Carla Gugino), but he wants to make his way to Earth so that he can find out who his father was, and also so he can meet Tulsa in person.  There's the whole issue of the physical toll the journey could cause him, but he doesn't care.  He heads to Earth with a small team of scientists to look after him, but he quickly ditches them so that he can set off on his own to find Tulsa.  They find each other quick enough, she finds out the truth about where he comes from, a relationship kicks off, and before long the two are stealing various cars and wallets so that they can afford a cross country trek to track down Gardner's father.

I think a very good and uplifting movie could be made from this idea, but the movie never quite gels in any way.  We don't sense the connection we're supposed to from Gardner and Tulsa, who seem to fall in love more out of necessity of the screenplay rather than actual chemistry.  We also don't get to truly see Gardner truly discovering or learning about life on Earth, since most of these scenes are handled in music montages.  We do get hints that he is not well, as evidenced by the fact that his nose will bleed at random, so we know his time on Earth could be short.  But again, these moments don't have quite the impact they should have.  There's something just off and somewhat cold about the emotions this movie tries to create in us, and eventually it started to remind me of something...

Yes, The Space Between Us gave me a case of Deja Vu, and for once, it wasn't because I felt like I had seen the movie before.  Here I was watching a movie that was intended to be uplifting and heartfelt, but I couldn't detect a pulse behind the picture.  It made me think back on a movie I saw a couple months ago called Collateral Beauty.  That was the film with Will Smith playing a man grieving over the death of his young daughter, so his friends decide to hire some actors to play the physical manifestations of Death, Love and Time, so that he will think he's going crazy. (Yes, believe it or not, some Hollywood Executive heard that pitch, and thought it was a good idea.) That movie was supposed to be a tearjerker, but it was so cold and off in its emotions.  I kept on thinking back on that movie while I was watching this, and I wondered why.  Then the end credits came, and I got my answer.  They both share the same screenwriter, Allan Loeb.

Maybe Loeb is just not very good at expressing deep emotion in his screenplays, or maybe his scripts keep on getting misinterpreted by the directors.  I honestly don't know.  All I know is that after his last two movies, he just doesn't seem to possess the ability to create genuine emotion in his audience.  Even the moments here that are supposed to be uplifting or sad seem to clang with indifference.  This is a movie that should make our hearts soar, but instead, we just watch things unfold with no involvement.  Not even when Gardner learns the identity of his father does the movie break free and let the emotions soar.  Instead, it gets interrupted by some last minute plot developments, and a ludicrous climax that I won't spoil here.  Maybe if we felt something for these characters, we'd be able to go along with what happens.  But, the way things are, nothing matters.

The Space Between Us plays out like a failed Young Adult book adaptation, even though it's an original screenplay. (I actually sat through part of the credits to see if it was based on a romance book for tweens, because it sure felt like it could be.) It does share many of the same issues, such as underdeveloped characters, a romance that just doesn't work, and good actors who just can't rise above the material.  There's nothing wrong with this movie that a few more rewrites could have fixed.  I came to this movie wanting to feel something, and all I got was a cold experience.

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