![]() ![]() Perhaps the most heartening thing about this journey is how well preserved the countryside is - with its spacious skies, amber waves of grain, and all that - so gorgeously rendered by DP Barry Peterson. But here, conveniently, Tulsa is an orphan and so has no parents. In a typical, by-the-numbers story, the repressed young couple would break away from their parents to take a spin across the scenic United States. For some reason, Nathaniel agrees to let him take the trip, and after landing, to no one’s surprise but Nathaniel’s, Gardner escapes while under medical evaluation, setting off to find Tulsa and the biological father he never knew - whoever that may be (you get one guess). Now, Gardner wants nothing more than to make the journey “home” and experience the planet everyone else takes for granted. In desperate need of human connection, Gardner somehow figures out a way to video-chat with a girl named Tulsa on Earth (evidently communications technology has evolved more than space travel since they chat in real time, though the commute between planets is still seven months). Still, it’s a lonely childhood for the boy: His peers are 14 scientists and a robot named Centaur, and though Gardner grows up much smarter than most kids, he’s still naïve in the ways of the world. Because Nathaniel has a brain condition that prevents him from experiencing interplanetary travel, he sends a surrogate mother, Kendra (Carla Gugino), to raise Gardner on East Texas, as his pioneering space station is known. Oldman’s character - who was clearly modeled after Virgin’s Richard Branson - may be responsible for colonizing Mars, but he’s otherwise a bottomless well of bad ideas. And now they have - courtesy of Nathaniel’s own company, Genesis Space Technologies. president when he was 12 explaining how “courage without limits” would lead men to colonize Mars. He’s been kept a secret ever since by an eccentric British space buff named Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman), who wrote a letter to the U.S. ![]() ![]() In truth, it’s a ridiculously expensive spin on “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” where the mostly Mars-set first act adds millions of dollars to the budget but virtually no value to the story itself, a by-the numbers meller in which a freakishly tall kid with spindly bones and an enlarged heart risks his life in order to experience love and the kind of companionship he’s been denied since birth.Ĭonceived on Earth by a father he’s never met, Gardner was the first human born on Mars (his mother died moments after holding her son for the first time). To some, that may sound like a compelling premise for a weepy romance - call it “The Fault in Our Planets,” if you like. Here, the tiny detail that prevents 16-year-old Gardner Elliot (“Hugo” star Asa Butterfield) from dating high-school student Tulsa ( Britt Robertson, of “Tomorrowland”) is the fact that Gardner has spent his entire life on the Red Planet - and if he travels to Earth, he may die. Taking John Gray’s 1992 title “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” a little too literally, “The Space Between Us” concocts an elaborate science-fiction scenario on which to hang an otherwise clichéd tale of impossible teen romance. ![]()
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