The Space Between Us

Cast: Gary Oldman, Asa Butterfield, Carla Gugino, Britt Robertson

Rated: 5/10

It’s been quite some Valentine seasons that no good romance from Hollywood has swayed your heart. Not just Hollywood, even Bollywood has not planned anything special for this special month.

The Space Between Us is an attempted romance in the sci-fi spatial genre and works hard at creating those moments with an ethereal looking female lead and her comp-and-romp interlude with a man from Mars, literally from Mars.

The film has its moments but they are as sparsely populated as life is on Mars from where this blue-watery-eyed 16-year-old comes. Born to an astronaut who boards the flight to Mars hiding her pregnancy from the world, and her husband, his vital organs are not equipped to handle gravity and thus he has to be banished to live on Mars for life, summarily sentenced to such spatial isolation by a company which had manned the mission.

After his mother Sarah Elliot dies in child birth, he is left in the company of a friendly robot and an undying ambition to go to earth and find his father. He also manages to establish contact and a long-distance contact with a college girl whom he romances across the universe.

But things turn linear when the film starts obsessing about this teen’s self discovery of life on earth. The chase to save him by fellow astronauts (he has an enlarge heart which is ready to burst due to the earth’s gravity) leads across the stunning landscape of America as the boy and the girl go on a road-trip to find the boy’s father.

The chemistry between the two is good but not good enough to hold the entire film on its own. A mildly interesting one from outer space. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 12 February, 2017