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The Space Between Us asks you to believe that journalists would show up in ball gowns to a press conference about a rocket launch—and that afterwards, they would spill out onto a picturesque runway, watching as a rocket revs its engines like a motorbike. Who wastes fuel like that? It’s clear we aren’t at NASA, and we aren’t going to be serious about science in this film. So where are we? I’ll just go ahead and tell you, since The Space Between Us is terrible at explaining itself in any other way than “Gary Oldman is a genius space inventor!” We’re dealing with a private space exploration company—a fantasy SpaceX, if you will—founded by Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman), a fantasy Elon Musk.
Back to that rocket ship: Within the first 15 minutes of the film—and midway to Mars—mission commander Sarah Elliot discovers she’s pregnant! Alas, while Fantasy SpaceX stocked enough snacks to last five years on Mars, they neglected to include even one measly abortion pill. Eventually, this unplanned space baby grows up to be Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield), which means there’s already a huge amount of ground to cover before Space Between even gets to be the story it wants to be, which is a doomed teenager make-out road trip movie.
