Movie review: "The Space Between Us" is aimed squarely at teens – Tulsa World

"The Space Between Us" is apparently a large divide when it comes to describing this silly, romantic, mixed-up movie.

It's an interplanetary adventure as a science-fiction flick with a race against time.

It's a teen romance (involving a girl named Tulsa!) formed around a fish-out-of-water story.

It's a morality play, and it's a redemption story.

It's a mess, more than anything, that goes from a convoluted, boring first hour to a second half that is such a heart-on-its-sleeve love story, aimed so squarely at tween girls, that your 12-year-old daughter may walk out of the theater swooning.

That may be the one group of people whose space between their ears will really appreciate "The Space Between Us."

Initially set in the very near future, NASA sends a shuttle of astronauts to prep Mars for colonization, but there's a problem: One of them is pregnant. The baby is born on Mars, and the mother dies in childbirth.

That makes Gardner Elliott the first human not born on Earth, and that makes him different.

No. 1: A full gestation in zero-gravity atmosphere means his organs are different than our own, endangering his ever coming home.

No. 2: Sentencing him to live on Mars is a bit of a public-relations nightmare, so his existence is kept a secret from the public.

I know what some may be thinking, but no: The moon landing was not faked.

This whole snafu leaves Gary Oldman, as the architect of this Mars mission, fretting and yelling at people about this massive cover-up, and it leaves a motherless boy stuck with astronauts inside a small space station for the first 16 years of his life.

Asa Butterfield ("Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children") already proved his sci-fi teen mettle in "Ender's Game," and now as Gardner he gets an upgrade to romantic lead.

But it takes forever to get him there in the hands of director Peter Chelsom ("Serendipity," "Hannah Montana: The Movie").

Between Oldman's rants down on Earth, Mars mother-figure Carla Gugino's sentimental concerns for the boy and Gardner's repeated questions What's Earth like? What's your favorite thing about Earth? Will I know how to act on Earth? that the only thing that kept me from snoring was thinking out loud: When are you going to get this boy on Earth?

The movie never really takes off until we get Gardner in front of Tulsa, the teen girl in Colorado he's been secretly future-texting from Mars, where the wi-fi is red planet-hot.

Tulsa is played by Britt Robertson, who was the one good thing about "Tomorrowland" and who, at 26, is so pretty that she can make us believe she's still in high school.

It turns out that she was abandoned at age 4 in Tulsa, and the orphan girl adopted the city as her nickname.

So we can see that bond start to form: Both Gardner and Tulsa grew up without parents, forced to live with strangers who didn't always tell them the truth.

Butterfield brings an awkward, goofy, somewhat cute manner to his discovery of Earth things both large and small, from crawly bugs to homeless people to Robertson's lips.

Robertson, playing the street-smart girl who can steal a car as easily as she takes off in a crop-dusting plane, brings a blushing sweetness to her tough chick, whose defenses weaken in the presence of a true innocent.

After a sloooow-developing period of great length, it's remarkable that the final act is as moving in a sappy kind of way as it is. Admittedly, my 12-year-old daughter may have coaxed that feeling along.

She and her friends are the audience for "The Space Between Us," and those accompanying them will just have to grin and bear it.

Michael Smith

918-581-8479

michael.smith@tulsaworld.com

Twitter: @michaelsmithTW

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Movie review: "The Space Between Us" is aimed squarely at teens - Tulsa World