The Space Between Us (2017)

The Space Between Us arrives from 2017 with the earnestness of a greeting card and the scientific literacy of a fortune cookie. A boy is born on Mars, his mother dies of eclampsia, and a billionaire named Nathaniel Shepard decides the tidiest solution is secrecy. Sixteen years later the boy, Gardner, travels to Earth to find a father and a girl he met in a chatroom. Peter Chelsom directs all of this with a straight face, which is admirable, since the script offers him little else to work with.

The film's cultural ambitions are modest to the point of vanishing. Gardner's beloved, Tulsa, is a foster kid from Colorado who has raised herself and thinks like an adult, a characterization that gestures toward resilience without ever interrogating the system that produced her. The cast is largely white, with BD Wong and Adande Thorne in supporting roles that could be filled by anyone. Race never enters the frame as a subject. Neither does sexuality, climate, or any recognizable social question of the past decade. Shepard's fear of a public relations disaster is the closest the screenplay comes to a critique of corporate power, and it lasts about as long as a press release.

What remains is a star-crossed romance about belonging, delivered with sincerity and a great deal of cheese. There is no sermon here, no lesson imposed on the audience, only a boy who wants to meet his father and a girl who wants a home. The film preaches nothing, which in an era of instructive entertainment is almost quaint. It is also, by most measures, a failure, grossing fifteen million against a thirty million dollar budget. The cultural record will survive without it, and so will we, mildly fatigued and moving on to the next screening.

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