The Space Between Us (2017)

Loved the story, nice to see something a bit different with a good twist which I must admit was fairly easy to predict. Really well acted and excellent direction. Will we watch it again, absolutely, great family entertainment.

The move is poorly executed. Besides all of the easily noticeable mistakes, most obvious one is a 25+ year old looking actor playing a 16 year old girl, who not only happens to be a professional car thief but a great stuntwoman as well. Landing a plane in the middle of the highway? No problem. Jumping out of a flying plane? Piece of cake. I don't know how, but they made a 19 year old actor look like a 14 year old kid. Those age differences and misuses are very disturbing throughout the whole movie. There are plenty of erroneous stuff but let's not zoom into them at the moment, it can go unnoticed for a regular viewer.The Plot - It's predictable and ambiguous. First of all, who doesn't use proper contraceptives before a flight in the cosmos? How come the mother of the main character is pregnant and still makes it aboard? That's rubbish. Second, not only the finale is obvious, but also the main plot twist (aka who's the father of Gardner).Overall, 6/10. Not that bad, if you just wanna say "Awww cute" in the end.

Two high school outlier teens (Gardner a 16 year old boy, and Tulsa a 17 year old girl) meet online, sharing their angst and common loss of parent(s), and finding empathy, love, and answers to the quisentential questions "who am I" and "what is my purpose?"The edgy Tulsa lives in Colorado, awaiting the three months left til she turns 18, graduates high school, emancipates herself from a life of foster care, and gets-out-of-Dodge.Gardner tells her he is a rich kid stuck in his parent's Park Ave penthouse because of his rare immunological bone disease... Obviously contrived, but the bond and trust between Gardner and Tulsa builds anyway, both discovering their mutual experience of losing and never knowing their mother.Gardner is of course not a boy-in-the-bubble prisoner of a rare bone disease, held captive in a Park Ave penthouse, but is REALLY held captive on Mars because his his oversized heart that developed in "zero gravity" of space, and later the low gravity of Mars...the son of the woman Commanding Astronaut leading a mission to Mars as the first humans to colonize the Red Planet, but turns out to be pregnant, and dies giving birth to Gardner before arriving at Mars.Looking beyond time-frame issues (lack of medical testing that surely would have been conducted and would have uncovered the stow-away embryo), his mother leaving Gardner an orphan, with a surrogate replacement mother-figure assigned as the new flight commander, whilst the eccentric genius founder of the NASA backed program bows to the publicly traded Board's designated eccentric-genius-founder-advisor in keeping the entire story secret and out of the public eye so as not to tank their stock and the program.Whew!This movie could go so many directions...but a mini-series on FX or other network would be required to do all, so the movie focuses on the teen first-love story, their search for understanding, true love, Gardner's search for for his father's identity, the meaning and purpose of their lives, adulthood freedom to make their own decisions and choices, whilst wrapping all this in teen-drama-love-story fashion.Well that was the right choice as The Space Between Us (against all odds) turns out to be a real heart-warmer, and no doubt tissues will be required by many. The film wraps the love story and search for self in just enough special effects and space/rocketry scenes (well executed) to make the grade as a sci-fi film.Asa Butterfield as Gardner is the lead and delivers a believable character, as does Britt Robertson as Tulsa. Expect to see a lot more of both these talented young actors.Gary Oldman delivers as always, but his character is not placed in the spotlight. Carla Gugino who plays the replacement mission commander/scientist/surrogate mother and guardian (whew2!!), did great job in her supporting role.One has to accept a lot considering this all takes place in 2018, has several obvious plot points that don't hold water, and gets to the edge of cheesiness in spots, but it all works and the movie is refreshing in having no "bad guys" while portraying teens that would be likely to carry a lot of negative baggage from their past the rest of their lives, find instead that each special moment they have now should be cherished, and the promising possibilities of tomorrow pursued.Cheesy...but it works, and it's "ok" to pull out all the stops when one produces (well) a feel-good sci-fi film with a positive message for all ages (10+), supported with uniformly excellent performances and realistic special effects.

A great premise with a some charming aspects of performance from Asa butterfield but otherwise a plot that needs a lot of contrived coinidences to make sense. Convenient that the kid has some sort of magnetic tracker in his chest that also happens to override the door locks, not just on mars but also in earth's nasa headquarters. Also convenient that the apparent child genius on mars turns into a mr bean socially incapable idiot on earth. And when did nasa decide that the best content of a training module on "human sexuality" should be a clip from a 1950s movie?Some entertainment and some charm but overall just too contrived to keep me on board.