No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown! The one where a boy from Mars is almost killed by his girlfriend

 

Title: The Space Between Us

What Year?: 2017

Classification: Mashup

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

With this review, I’m going into a new phase of this feature, which I have reflected by changing the numbering. I decided it was time for a reboot, and from here on in, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy. I am going for no less than a lineup of the actual worsts, and my key criterion is that they are all going to be the worst of something, be it genres, trends, or more specific subniches. What will further set these apart is that many if not most are going to be from well within the current millennium, thus representing some of the most hated and ridiculed developments of modern cinema. There was no better choice to start with than a good old alleged teen romance, a genre that hovers just above self-parody to begin with, and I had one in mind that is definitely as egregious an example as you can get. I present The Space Between Us, and it’s so dumb I literally assumed there had to be a YA novel behind it until my investigations proved otherwise.

Our story begins with an expedition to colonize Mars, sponsored by a Musk/ Bezos analog, with a spunky lady astronaut as commander. The mission runs into a hitch when it turns out she came down with a baby before leaving Earth. Alas, she dies in childbirth, and for various contradictory and equally illogical reasons, the tycoon and the space program suits cover it up. Skip forward, and we meet her son, a 16-year-old boy named Gardner, raised in secrecy from everyone but the dozens and hundreds of experts keeping him alive. The scientists are debating whether they can bring him back to Earth for normal human contact, notwithstanding completely justified predictions that the Terran environment will kill him. Meanwhile, Gardner has made a friend, a girl named Tulsa who has no idea who he is. On his return to Earth, Gardner escapes to meet up with Tulsa, who freely helps him stay ahead of his guardians and doctors. The chase becomes a quest for love and acceptance as he searches for his real father- and is there any chance they won’t hook up?

The Space Between Us was a 2017 film directed by Peter Chelsom from a script by Allen Loeb. The film was developed by Relativity Media, reportedly from a story proposed in 1999. The film starred Asa Butterfield and Britt Robertson, with Gary Oldman as the billionaire Nathaniel Shepherd. It was filmed beginning in late 2015, with a release by STX Entertainment planned for 2016. After several postponements, it was released in February 17. It received mixed to unfavorable reviews and was a commercial failure, earning $16 million against a $30M budget.

For my experiences, I skipped ahead straight to my big rant, the pointless conspiracy-theory angle, which would make even less sense if they were trying to fool their backing governments. (Though, there are suspiciously detailed analyses of things official sources insist have never happened in space…) What somewhat interested me right off the bat is how much more fascinating the story would be without it. If Gardner was known to the public, he would be a celebrity just for existing (and a fundraising pinata), and his life would probably be even more miserable than what we see. He wouldn’t just be living in the bubble with cameras and sensors everywhere. His entire life from infancy to early adulthood would be on video and possibly on the internet. On top of that, he would have little chance of interacting with someone who didn’t have an angle, from journalists to conspiracy theorists trying to prove that he didn’t exist. The one thing that would absolutely make sense is that he would prefer to hide his identity from someone he had a real connection with.

Moving forward, the thing that stands out is that the science here isn’t “that” bad, especially considering that it came from “mainstream” creators. (See my rant under When Worlds Collide...) It may be on the arm-waving level, but it still offers sensible answers to important questions we probably won’t really figure out until and unless the events portrayed become reality. Just as importantly, the film rarely if ever contradicts or ignores a previously established point for simple story convenience, though by the end, its solutions would be just as likely to kill the non-Terran anyway. The real problem is that there’s little if any effort to show how any changes on Earth. The state of technology is not just unchanged but in some cases seemingly out of date (not even counting the biplane), almost more like an alternate-universe 1999 than our own future. (The wonky tech actually kind of mitigates the unacknowledged problem of lightspeed lag, which wouldn’t be that big an issue for old-school email.) The most curious plot hole is that we never hear any of the Earthbound civilians talk about the Mars colony spontaneously; in fact, Tulsa doesn’t even acknowledge it when Gardner insists he is from there. This would suggest that the public is already growing skeptical of the venture, perhaps to the point of spinning theories that the whole thing is fake, or else her character in particular is oblivious to it… and as we’ll see in a moment, she does not need another strike against her.

That leaves the romance angle, and this is where I maintain the movie is truly in “worst” territory. The easy shot out of the gate is that Ms. Robertson would have been 25 at the start of filming, except she doesn’t really look so far off that it becomes distracting. What doesn’t help is that her character is at best an increasingly generic spunky-princess type, and at worst a miscreant with a man-child fetish. All of those issues still fall far short of the dysfunctionality of their relationship, which is a perfect storm of ableism and reverse chauvinism. Gardner absolutely cannot handle himself on Earth, physically, socially or emotionally, and Tulsa certainly knows this. Factor in her gray-area morals and vastly greater experience, and they are as compatible as Frosty the Snowman and the Human Torch.  But they are supposed to be in love, and society and the media still accept a male defying authority to prove he is independent and manly even if his mental age is “call SVU now” and he could easily get himself literally dead. The bottom line, the only more incompatible couple I can think of in all my reviews would be the lesbians from Prey (which would definitely be in this lineup if I hadn’t gotten to it long ago), and they were at least supposed to be messed up. And somewhere in the night, an Evil Possum is screaming…

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with the one I rewound the most. Just a little into the movie, we get a view of the outside of the colony that definitely looks expensive. Then we come to Gardner and a robot called I think Centauri, who does indeed look like a human torso crossed with a tracked chassis. There’s some good dialogue between the pair that I can’t quite recount, in which the robot sets off the usual arguments about AI by insisting its feelings are hurt. Meanwhile, Gardner watches a movie that looks to be from the 1950s or so as if it was his best source for what things are like on Earth, while he complains that he only ever meets scientists. It all builds up to what is clearly only his latest mischief, in which the disabled and indignant bot is left behind. It’s a very effective introduction to the character, his background and his world, and it’s far more interesting than any of his subsequent adventures.

In closing, I’m back to the rating. This was another movie I actually brought up a rating. It is also, however, another movie where this was not really a verdict in the film’s favor. On a certain level, if this movie really deserved the lowest rating, I probably wouldn’t even have bothered to watch it. I will even admit that it manages a real charm, in stretches. In the proverbial light of day, however, the one thing that stayed my hand is that even I can tell that this is anything but unique. And that gets to one more rant that was a major reason I covered it at all: When people do “worst” movies lists, the emphasis is always on genre films, but I don’t buy for a moment that this is because SF/ fantasy/ horror movies are uniquely prone to badness. I posit that the real difference is that these attract the kind of fandom that remembers and preserves the bad along with the good. You can see the difference especially in a film like this, a crossover that failed in its own time and was quickly and conveniently forgotten by the respectable mainstream, but hardcore genre completists like me haven’t let it slip into the night. This is indeed bad, not because it dragged in sci fi but because its mainstream influences were at least as formulaic, and we will not forget it. With that, I’m calling it good enough, because things can still get a lot worse.