(He fills his days with repeat viewings of “Wings of Desire,” violating the rule that a film should never contain another, better film that audiences would rather be watching.) Jump to 16 years later: The astronaut’s baby boy, Gardner, is now a teenager (played by Asa Butterfield, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”) who feels hemmed in he’s spent his entire life on Mars, mourning his mother and curious about the father he never met. (Already this movie is muddled - who, exactly, is Shepherd? Is he with the government? Is he a rich investor in the project? And if the latter, why does he worry about the money going away? We’re only five minutes in at this point there’s plenty more bad plotting to come.) To avoid negative publicity, the mysterious Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman) keeps the baby a secret lest the project’s backers pull out.Īlso Read: STX Bumps 'The Space Between Us' From 2016 to Avoid 'Passengers' (Unless John Waters is directing, women never throw up in the movies unless they’re with child similarly, they never cough unless they’re dying.) The baby is born on the Red Planet, but the mother dies immediately afterward. This movie may take itself seriously, but it defies viewers to do likewise.Ī manned mission to Mars to create a colony there goes awry when the one female astronaut in the crew discovers she’s pregnant. “The Space Between Us” hearkens back to those movies in such a clumsy and clichéd fashion that it merely reminds you what its predecessors did correctly.īy the time we reach a ludicrous third act, involving predictable revelations and a spacebound ticking clock, “The Space Between Us” evolves from prompting giggles and facepalms to full-on, out-and-out guffaws. After the success of “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” there was an entire sub-genre of movies about boys or aliens or robots (or robot boys or alien robots) who fled the authorities while learning about what it means to be human.

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