O Espaço Entre Nós

Okay, I'm old school dude. Like Golden Age of Science Fiction old. Maybe I'm too tolerant. But I'm not the only one! There is a lot of slamming going on here. The truth is this isn't a bad movie. If you want to be cynical then go right ahead and not enjoy yourself. This isn't science fiction. It's fantasy. Most of the gripes I read are legit. There are plenty of things that aren't scientifically correct. The plot is a new twist on an ancient concept. It's a STORY. I like the movie because it was fun to watch. Entertaining. And for a change, not a shot was fired except for rockets. So cut it a little slack and go in and be entertained.

You know how it goes. The boy (Asa Butterfield) meets the girl (Britt Robertson), there's mutual liking and they want to meet... but there's a space between them. So he will travel to Earth from the Mars colony where he was born.

Also starring: Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino, and B.D. Wong, because even the coolest teenagers need some adults around.

"The Space Between Us" rides on the current wave of Young Adult, or YA for short, novels and movies which has dowsed the cinemas for the last ten years or so.

It's still about romance, some sci-fi and action like the most of them (or at least the most popular of them) but it brings some refreshing changes to the menu.

It's based on an original screenplay and not novel. It offers sci-fi and action without relying on done to death YA clichés (dystopian society, dating or fighting supernatural beings, etc). It puts characters in real danger so you can't always predict whether everybody's gonna make it. It doesn't have clear-cut good and bad guys...

And last but by far not least, the movie has a nice classic Steven Spielberg-ian feel which puts the sense of wonder and adventure back to sci-fi which, in my humble opinion, is often missing or buried under all those visual effects and pizazz setpieces.

Even good old Spielberg himself is not always able to pull it off: the movie makes you actually care about the characters because there's a real human backbone to the story. It's entertainment but it also has heart.

All this rests very much on the lead man Asa Butterfield who was 18 during the filming and turns 20 this April.

Former child star of "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas", Scorsese's "Hugo" and "Ender's Game" fame, this guy has grown to become a fine young actor indeed.

I very much enjoyed his soft but sure performance as an innocent and fragile alien braving the world unknown to him. He has found a seemingly perfect balance between strange, childlike and soulful that the role asks of him, and I'd be glad to see him getting some awards or nominations for this standout work.

He even has this memorable, Pinocchio-ish appearance and style of moving which seems suitable for a person not used to Earth's gravity.

The other characters stay more in the background, so this turns out to be Asa Butterfield's show, and he more than fulfills the promise.

The next most interesting performance comes from Oldman who ventures in the land of brashness and theatricality, in a good way. The aging thespian hasn't offered this kind of colorfulness for quite some time (in a big movie, at least) and I enjoyed it to the point of feeling that his character was underused. Holding him in the background makes sense in the context of a whole story, though.

If you find my score surprisingly high, please remember that it's made for a YA crowd, or at least a teenager in all of us. I would not recommend it alongside 8 out of 10 movies made for older viewer groups. Probably.

But 8 is not too generous. I liked "Space" very much and its overall quality more than compensates a shallow story which surely would work better longer. This could be a bona fide modern classic if the characters and events had more room to develop and breathe. Maybe in the form of (mini-)series or something.

If you like "The Space Between Us" and look for something similar to watch, I would recommend 2014's "The Fault in Our Stars" for moving YA story, or 2015's "Tomorrowland" as an uneven but good example of how to combine sci-fi and action in a YA movie.

I choose to end this review with an off-topic anecdote which I just happen to like very much:

Q: Why did astronaut leave his wife? A: He needed more space

This movie was fine. It's no masterpiece, but I actually found it much more enjoyable than "The Martian," the vaunted 2015 Matt Damon vehicle. That may be somewhat more scientifically accurate - although it still had its share of errors - but it just used people as setpieces for the situation, with no real character development.

I liked Asa Butterfield as the eponymous character in "Ender's Game," and he's just as good here. Before you tag me as an Asa fan, I didn't like him in Scorsese's "Hugo." Here, he was convincing as a Mars-born child with his childlike, guileless naiveté and tall, gangly build. One professional critic compared this with "Flight of the Navigator," but Gardner isn't the smartmouth kid like David was in that movie, and Asa is a far, far better actor than Joey Cramer was. Likewise Gary Oldman, some of whose roles I have detested (his Doctor Smith in the awful "Lost in Space") while others like his Commissioner Gordon in Nolan's Batman movies were fine. The critics think he was over the top as billionaire mogul Nathaniel Shepard, but I found him to be a rather plausible mix of Steve Jobs' salesmanship, Elon Musk's arrogance and spaceflight ambitions, and Howard Hughes' fascination with flying and reclusive eccentricity.

You can tell that many of the movie's fiercest critics here have their own agendas, usually trying to prove they're smarter than the writer. All their comments do is reveal their closed minds and often their ignorance. One smart aleck claims Gardner's mother looked 5 months pregnant in the film. The shot where she peers out of the spacecraft window as she cradles her expanding belly was at an indeterminate time sometime after her sonogram two months after launch, possibly right before landing more than seven months after launch. Same person talks about Mars gravity being 2/3rd of Earth's. No, it's 1/3rd. Plus she complains that the Earth's resources are said to be depleted. That phrase was Nathaniel reading from a letter he wrote to the President as a 12-year-old, full of youthful enthusiasm and exaggeration, not stated as actual scientific fact. Another critic tries to look intelligent by saying Mars is four light minutes away. It is at its closest, but the distance isn't constant and is over 22 light minutes at its furthest. (Another genius here claims it's 90 light minutes each way.) The communication with Mars was instantaneous because they clearly plastered "QuantumCom light minute compression" on the comm screens to imply they've figured out how to use quantum entanglement for instant data transfer at interplanetary distances (still inplausible as it's based on a common misconception, but still far less fantastical than laser swords, warp drive, time travel, telepathy, teleportation devices or humanoid aliens attacking to steal our water, oxygen, etc.). Besides, it's a dramatic technique, as waiting minutes between messages with no realtime interaction just isn't very interesting, unless you liked "You've Got Mail." Another critic who claims to be an MD rated the movie 1 star for no other reason than they pronounced a test "TROponin" rather than "tropPOnin" as he preferred, even though the former is in fact the correct pronunciation, as any medical dictionary can confirm. I wouldn't want him as my doctor, or even playing one on TV. One complained that Gardner's mother was too young to be a mission commander, but probably never said the same about the similarly young Jessica Chastain in "The Martian." Another smart guy claimed the spacecraft would have accelerated halfway to Mars, providing gravity all the way, then turned around and decelerated. Anybody with a knowledge of physics would laugh him out of the room after telling him that would require several times more reaction mass (fuel) than the total mass of the entire spacecraft, a physical impossibility. One critic savages the movie for having contemporary products in it. It's a relatively low budget science fiction film, not a $400 million blockbuster. They spent their budget on more important things like CGI effects, spacecraft props, Mars sets and weightlessness effects, not wasting it creating an entire future Earth, and the projections in movies set in the near future like "2001" always turn out looking dated after a few years anyway. You get the idea; the criticisms are generally incredibly petty, nitpicky and often just plain wrong. I can see plenty of scientific and technological mistakes, especially the Dream Chaser spacecraft used at the end, which would need a large booster and a launchpad rather than taking off using its own small rocket engines from a runway. But I accept that this is a movie, not a documentary, and focus on the characters, whom I did like and care about.

Basically, the critiques boil down to "it's for kids!" As someone approaching retirement age, I'd much rather be young at heart than cranky and old in the head.

The 2017 adventure-drama-romance "The Space Between Us" (PG-13, 2:00) is the tale of two teens… played by Asa Butterfield and Britt Robertson, who shine as two of the most promising young adult actors of the 2010s. At just eight years old, Butterfield anchored the underseen Holocaust drama "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas". At 10, he filmed the title role in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" which became a Best Picture Oscar nominee and earned Butterfield several young actor accolades, including a Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer. In the ensuing years, he starred in high-profile film adaptations of the novels "Ender's Game" and "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children". For her part, Robertson has received similar awards recognition, but mostly for very different kinds of roles. In her teens and very early 20s, she appeared in the films "Keeping Up with the Steins", the Steve Carell comedy "Dan in Real Life", "Scream 4" and "The First Time", followed by a few short-lived TV series including "Life Unexpected" and "Under the Dome". Her film career really started to take off with roles in "White Rabbit", the adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks' novel "The Longest Ride" and the under-appreciated "Tomorrowland". Pretty impressive resumes for this stage in their careers! But before their careers reach the proverbial stratosphere, Movie Fans get to see the two rising stars in an on-screen stratosphere, part of a romance that's "Out of This World", as the film was originally titled.

"The Space Between Us" follows the life of Gardner Elliot (Butterfield), the first person born on Mars, who wants nothing more than to come to earth. Astronaut Sarah Elliot (Janet Montgomery), unaware that she's pregnant, is going into space, leading the first group of humans to actually live on Mars. At the end of her long trip to the Red Planet, she goes into labor. Sarah delivers a healthy baby boy, but dies immediately afterward, which creates a long list of complex problems. The private company which financed the Mars colony (known as "East Texas") is concerned about a probable public relations nightmare (and possible resulting loss in their funding) – but is also very worried about how the young boy caught in the middle of this situation will grow and develop – physically (in Mars' gravity) – and emotionally (with no parents to care for and raise him). After the company's board discusses all of the implications of the situation, Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman), the company's visionary creator, and Tom Chen (BD Wong), the company's CEO, agree to lie to the world about the reason for Sarah's death, keep her infant son's very existence classified and leave the boy on Mars to grow up in "East Texas".

Gardner ends up being raised by scientists, but mostly astronaut Kendra Wyndham (Carla Gugino), who looks after him and is the closest thing he has to a mother, but it's not the same as actually knowing his own mother. When we see him as a 16-year-old, his intelligence is obvious, but we're also aware that he has never had a friend (or even met anyone) his own age. He builds a robot with rudimentary AI, but it's not the same as having an actual best friend. He has struck up a Skype friendship with a teenage girl who goes by the nickname of Tulsa (Robertson), but Gardner has to lie to her about who and where he really is. Tulsa is a foster kid who was abandoned by her parents when she was four and has been transitioning from bad foster home to bad foster home ever since. Tulsa is jaded and a little bitter, while Gardner is naïve and optimistic, but their shared longing to break out of their current circumstances helps them to bond, along with their shared experience of not having been raised by their birth parents.

When the doctors at East Texas come up with a medical procedure that solves some of the physical challenges Gardner would encounter in earth's gravity, those at NASA and at Shepherd's company who always wanted Gardner to have his chance to visit earth finally prevail and Gardner is prepared for his first trip from the Red Planet to the Blue Planet. When he arrives, he is immediately placed in quarantine while doctors run tests to determine whether he would be in any medical danger on earth. Anxious to experience earth for himself, and worried that the scientists are going to send him back to Mars, he escapes and makes his way to Colorado to meet Tulsa. She is very skeptical when he tells her the truth about his background, but she helps him evade Shepherd and Kendra (who are desperately searching for Gardner) and the two teens go on a road trip to fulfill Gardner's ultimate goal of finding his father.

"The Space Between Us" is creative, entertaining and touching, but noticeably flawed. Butterfield is perfectly cast and exudes an earnest sweetness that is captivating, while Robertson does her usual excellent work, but doesn't feel like the best fit for her role. For comparison (even if it requires referencing movies from different generations), this one is reminiscent of 2014's "The Fault in Our Stars" as well as the 1976 made-for-TV movie "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble". This movie's premise is inspired – and screenwriter Alan Loeb's focus on the budding romance between Gardner and Tulsa personalizes the story – but the improbability of much of the plot almost pushes it from science fiction into fantasy. Director Peter Chelsom strikes a good balance between the drama and the natural humor that would arise from the situations in such a story, but has trouble effectively blending the larger-than-life tale with the very personal saga at the film's core. Still, there are some cool twists. This movie is enjoyable, but there's too much space between its potential and its execution. "B"

This is basically a movie about two teenagers on the run. They meet for the first time. The girl is streetwise and assertive. The boy is geeky and naive. They drive off through an America with lots of great scenery, and there's humour and romance and some feel good music. This is what is at the heart of the movie and it works well.

What doesn't work well is the back story, about the boy being born on mars. It makes for a pretty uneven film that starts out as a sci-fi movie with a crew of astronauts heading out to the stars, then morphs into something completely different. The special effects in space are wasted, because this part of the story didn't really need to be shown. Plus, some of the incidental music doesn't work too well.

The makers should've just stuck to the story of a lost boy who wanted to see the world, and a girl who just didn't fit in and was willing to show it to him.