The great trope of a confined romance of (in)convenience sparking on a long-distance trip, like on a transatlantic crossing, has long complicated the cinematic lives of charismatic, magnetized yet seemingly incompatible people. Taking that to the stars, the final frontier for everything including narrative contrivances, is a logical progression. Space tourism is here and the kind of space travel that would mirror past generations’ oceanic voyages palpably nears. Enter Moonshot, director Chris Winterbauer’s movie that forces together two romance-adjacent up-and-comers (Lana Condor of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Cole Sprouse of Riverdale) in order for them to question their ambitions, their current relationships and their present infatuation. Giving it all a sci-fi coat of paint—colorful jumpsuits, sliding Star Trek doors, snippets of interplanetary CG scene-setting—can’t cover up how standardized Max Taxe’s script feels, nor the sparklessness of its leads. Unfortunately, even though Moonshot aims high, its misfire falls all the way back down to humble terra firma.
Sprouse’s Walt spends his days pining after Mars, partially colonized by his local college’s space program, and slinging lattes. He’s singularly focused and singularly unskilled—his 30-odd applications have all been rightly rejected, while his snippy robo-manager at the coffee shop has been programmed with ten times his personality. He runs into Sophie (Condor) by earthbound happenstance, crunching the device she uses to communicate with (and pine after) her long-distance Martian boyfriend. The pair’s antagonistic meet-cute culminates in an unlikely scheme to sneak Walk aboard her flight to Mars, with both parties looking to visit a significant other…or at least using their significant others as excuses to leave their sad lives behind.
In this way, the destination doesn’t matter. It rarely does in these kinds of movies. But it’s almost exhausting how little Moonshot does to separate Walt stowing away on say, a steamliner, from smuggling onto a spaceship. The aesthetics are barely distinct; the lingo only slightly altered. It’s simply an excuse to confine Walt and Sophie together in the same room for 35 days, pretending to be a couple, where their relationship inevitably turns from snarky disdain (delivered by Sprouse as a would-be motormouth charmer and by Condor as a more entertaining, cutting stick-in-the-mud) to a begrudging crush. The pair aren’t entirely unlikable, though their zingers and emotional development are partitioned off so distinctly that it draws attention to just how by-the-numbers the screenwriting is. Rather, they’re just…trope vessels, stuck on a spacefaring trope vessel, shot and edited into another. The setting feels like such a tacked-on afterthought that they might as well have called it Rom-Com: In Space.