FAILS TO LAUNCH
Teen interstellar romance has good intentions, but is far from extraordinary
F Nicholas Sparks wrote science fiction, he might come up with something like this teen soap in which boys are, like, literally from another planet. Well, at least one is: Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield), the first human born on Mars, now 16 and obsessed with Earth. He’s been interstellar-texting, you see, with a Colorado girl named Tulsa (Britt Robertson), under the guise of being a sickly shut-in who lives on Park Avenue.
But Gardner’s real home is the red planet’s first outpost, created by the Richard Bransonish billionaire Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman, treating this as better material than it is). His initial team’s lead astronaut (Janet Montgomery) discovers she’s pregnant en route, then dies in childbirth. On Shepherd’s orders, it’s all kept secret, giving the teen Gardner first-rate “nobody even knows I exist” angst. He even goes joyriding in a Mars rover, wrecking it and nearly killing himself. But his outbursts work: He gets a trip to Earth, after surgery to make his bones strong enough to survive our heavier gravity.
Director Peter Chelsom (“Hannah Montana: The Movie”) and screenwriter Allan Loeb (“Collateral Beauty”) squander countless opportunities to make this fish-out-of-water story intellectually curious or even much fun. We learn little about Gardner’s life on Mars, other than that he has a robot buddy (dialogue quality: “I’m your best friend.” “No, you’re a robot”) and helps out in a greenhouse. Once he gets to our planet, the wide-eyed Butterfield basically remains, well, wide-eyed. “What’s your favorite thing about Earth?” Gardner asks everyone he meets, as if completing a Martian homework assignment.
Meanwhile, surly Tulsa is, implausibly, a pariah in spite of being a motorcycleriding, plane-flying, leather jacket-wearing badass. She and Gardner have lessons to learn from each other, spelled out in metaphors that will either induce tears (if you’re a tween) or eye-rolls (anyone else). The biggest hurdle? He won’t survive long on Earth — his heart is just too fragile.
Still, there’s sweetness to be found in their bond, and in Gardner’s Earthly delights and occasional fright: Apparently, his Mars media library didn’t include horses. He sees all the good in life that foster-child Tulsa has been missing. But their awkwardly cute banter gets drowned out in the chase, as Shepherd and the boy’s guardian (Carla Gugino) track the teens’ search for his father — leading to a twist you won’t need a telescope to see coming.