Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Gary Oldman, Asa Butterfield, Carlo Gugino, Britt Robertson, Janet Montgomery, Trey Tucker, Scott Takeda, Adande Thorne, Sarah Minnich, Ryan Jason Cook, BD Wong, Lauren Myers, Morse Bicknell, Beth Bailey, Peter Chelsom, Anthony Jarvis, Jenny Gabriele, Colin Egglesfield.
We are all products of our environments, some are harsher than others, some are more pliable and interesting, yet we all have hardships to overcome, we all have to jump through hoops to get ahead, to not stand still and feel as though we are nothing but a vicious experiment gone wrong.
Born on Mars, born without hope of ever seeing the planet of his origins, a young man dreams of seeing what is beyond, what is truly the point of being human; it is a situation of environment over need, over want and one seized upon in The Space Between Us.
Asa Butterfield has been around so long that his obvious talent on screen perhaps goes unnoticed at times; not from the audience who have over time have fallen in love with this young British film star, but from the camera who fail to pick up on his many endearing traits, the strength underneath the geeky exterior, the heart in the performance. Yet like his performance as Bruno in The Boy In The Stripped Pyjamas and Nathan Ellis in X+Y, in The Space Between Us the camera really and quite rightly focuses on the young man’s demeanour, the inner turmoil, the absolute joy in his craft and for such a young man, he truly gets what it means to capture the essence of the strange and unyielding.
As Gardener Elliot, Mr. Butterfield excels, his time on screen with Britt Robertson is an enjoyable and memorable, a young story of love forged between two outsiders in a society that denies them existence and one that whilst may a universal theme is nevertheless one that resonates in us all at some point.
Whilst not a wholly original theme, The Space Between Us is a film that takes great care to show just how alien we all in our surroundings, just how lost we can be when we look up to the stars and that our home is not sometimes where we wish we could be but where we fit in, where we can do the most good.
A film of extravagant thought but one that also feels very much down to Earth, love is after all something that you feel you should stretch across any boundary to have, any obstacle should be overcome, even the space between us and life.
Ian D. Hall