Starring Asa Butterfield (“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” and “Ender’s Game”) and Britt Robertson (“The Longest Ride”), the YA science fiction romance film, The Space Between Us, is a shocking hit.

The movie follows an astronaut’s accidental pregnancy and eventual birth of Gardner Elliot (Butterfield), the first human being on Mars during a colonization mission.

With Gardner’s mom dying during childbirth, Gardner is raised by astronauts decades older than him, making him crave interpersonal relationships with humans his own age.

However, because Gardner was born on Mars, he developed many health issues including an enlarged heart and low bone density, hindering his chance at survival on Earth.

With persistenc
e and lots of persuasion, Gardner, full of awkwardness and clumsiness, comes to Earth under supervision of NASA and those who are in the Mars colonization project, which he defiantly escapes to see Tulsa, his interplanetary girlfriend he met online.

As the two escape Gardner’s protectors and adventure throughout America to find Gardner’s dad, the two fall become increasingly enamored with one another.

Seemingly dull, cliche, and second-rate in the trailer, the wholehearted, family-friendly The Space Between Us was better than many expected it to be.

The movie will satisfy any fan of cliche teenage romances, as many scenes can be made into the type of car commercial where you have a madly
in love couple listening to pop music and driving into the distance in the middle of beautiful nowhere.

The movie’s cleverly beautiful scenery alone made the film worth watching. For instance, while in The Martian, Mars was depic
ted as dull and depressing, but the color and texture in The Space Between Us makes Mars bright and prominent, making the red-planet seem more habitable for the future.

Other beautiful sceneries include Yosemite-esque, yellow-leaved forests, simple barren deserts, and California’s refreshing Malibu coastline.

However, as a forewarning, the movie is essentially an interplanetary, more optimistic version of The Fault in our Stars, which can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. I happened to love The Fault in our Stars, so I liked The Space Between Us. But for someone who does not, the movie may be too dull and hard to sit through.