Chemistry of characters makes this space tale a winner
RED ROVER Grade: BWhere: Available on demand
Predictability in astronomy is a wonderful thing. If you launch a spacecraft toward Mars, you want to know the planet will be in the right place many months later when the ship arrives.
In film, that kind of consistency can be something of a handicap. When Cara Gee came flouncing into the movie Red Rover, playing a fiercely upbeat free spirit wearing a spacesuit — I felt I already knew too much about her character. And while the film was not without its narrative twists, as a romantic-comedy it arrives at its destination with rocket-science accuracy and timing.
That’s not altogether a bad thing. Red Rover, the newest from Toronto-based filmmaker Shane Belcourt, tells the lighthearted story of sad-sack Damon (the always watchable Kristian Bruun), who’s just been fired from his job as a geologist, and whose home life could not be more demoralizing — he’s living in the basement of a house he shares with his ex, whose new boyfriend has moved in upstairs.
Gee plays Phoebe, a musician who’s also handing out flyers for Red Rover, an organization looking to recruit citizen astronauts for a one-way trip to Mars. (You may recall the similarly themed Mars One project, founded in 2011, dissolved in bankruptcy in 2019, never having gotten off the ground.)
Damon is drawn to the idea of leaving Earth behind and starts planning his application.
Belcourt is more interested in chemistry than physics. There’s very little science to be found in Red Rover. But again this is for the best, as Bruun and Gee make an appealing onscreen couple, he stolid and shy, she a zephyr in a flight suit.
It’s easy to be won over by the film’s upbeat nature. And Toronto residents can wallow in a movie that was shot, pre-pandemic, in the Beaches neighbourhood, and includes a scene set at the Canadian National Exhibition, which announced it won’t be taking place this year. Red Rover provides the fantasy of a trip to Earth as it once was.