Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Moonshot’ on HBO Max, a Sci-fi Rom-Com Clunker That Lana Condor Can’t Salvage

Not to be confused with Moonfall, Moon Knight or Moons Over My Hammy, Moonshot is a rom-com/sci-fi hybrid streaming exclusively on HBO Max. It positions Riverdale guy Cole Sprouse opposite To All the Boys superstar-in-the-making Lana Condor as they voyage across the galaxy, pretending not to like each other even though anyone whose brain isn’t a wad of ABC turkey jerky knows that’s not true. Will this tried-and-true formula achieve flight in a fresh setting? Or will it be just another space rock leaving an imperceptible dent in the surface of the cinema landscape?

MOONSHOT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Truth in Advertising Dept. would like to inform you that this movie, despite its title, has nothing at all to do with the Moon. But Marsshot just doesn’t have that je ne sais quois. It’s 2049: Humankind has settled on Mars and robots manage coffeeshops, but a man’s cruddy, cruddy life is still symbolized by that old scene where he’s working a crap dead-end job and takes a bag of trash to the dumpster and the bag breaks open and spatters him with blecch and gross bits. Some things never change. Why, you may ask, doesn’t the robot take out the trash? Because, dear reader, that’s part of the joke: Walt (Sprouse) is so lowly, he answers to the robot. His life sucks.

Walt is an early-20-something, as aimless as they get. He changed his college major 16 times, and he’s lonely with no girlfriend prospects. His mediocrity defines him. He yearns – oh does he yearn – to go to Mars. He’s applied for the colonization program 36 times and been rejected 36 times, but that doesn’t stop the 37th attempt. One night, he meets and smooches Ginny (Emily Rudd) and maybe feels something, but mostly just feels the whoosh of the rocket to Mars she boards the very next day. Sux!!!

Walt pries himself away from dumpster duty long enough to chat with coffee patron Sophie (Condor), who sees him as an irritating pest, and is right on the money with that one. Nevertheless, he manages to get her to share her story: She wants to go to Mars to see her boyfriend, Calvin (Mason Gooding), who knows everything there is to know about algae, including how it can consume all the garbage that’s slowly covering Earth. Talk about Sophie’s choice: Algae Dude or Trashman Walt. Is there a third option? A pet gerbil, maybe?

But I’m getting ahead of the movie here, because there’s a what-with-one-thing-and-another setup to get through before the rom part of this com gets in gear. What with one stupid thing and another, Sophie overcomes her fear of flying and buys a million-dollar commercial ticket to Mars (should we ask how she can afford it? Nah), and Walt, inspired by the story of a cat who stowed away in an escape pod, stows away in an escape pod. Additional moronic contrivances force the two of them together into the same cabin for the 35-day journey through the galaxy, Walt passing himself off as the algae guy and Sophie afraid to be caught aiding and abetting a criminal irritant. Will they fall in love? THOU SHALT NOT SPOIL THY PLOT.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The long-space-trek movie met the rom-com previously in Passengers, the J-Law/Chris Pratt flick that was even more dysfunctional than this one. Netflix released space-peril movie Stowaway just last year.

Performance Worth Watching: Condor won over many hearts in three To All the Boys movies, showing a remarkable balance of light comedy and heartfelt drama. She has a bright future as long as she avoids movies that saddle her with dialogue like…

Memorable Dialogue: “You are the ingrown toenail of humanity. Leave me alone.” – Even Condor struggles to make this clunker (among many) of a zinger crackle

Sex and Skin: None. There’s one scene in which Sophie and Walt climb out of their spacesuits and she ganders an eyeful of his heinie in boxer briefs, but that doesn’t count.

Our Take: I kept waiting for Moonshot to charm me, but it never happened. Condor’s natural charisma should fuel this thing, but Sprouse’s Ryan Reynolds Lite chatter-snark is the sand in the gears grinding it to a standstill. Goofy omnipresent robot voices interject one-liners, sitcommy supporting characters come and go unmemorably (including Zach Braff, who turns up late in the third act as the billionaire founder of the Mars colony), 2001 and Philip K. Dick references land with a splat and the inevitable pseudo-philosophical two-blips-in-the-vastness-of-the-universe moments are more corny than profound. Such things aren’t good or funny enough to distract us from the painful truth that our two protagonists are so thin and generic, their love story lies there like a damp dead fish.

Amidst the silliness, there’s featherweight drama, hinging on two young people trying to determine who they are and what they want to be, coalescing with Walt giving Sophie this bit of advice regarding her relationship with Algae Dude: “Don’t terraform yourself – it’s your life too.” This is the only laugh the movie inspired. Note that this line isn’t supposed to be funny, while the ones that are supposed to be funny are so very desperate to be funny. The movie tries to hybridize two genres, setting lightly combative banter and forced tender moments against Ikea Basics Spaceship backdrops, which, despite establishing a tone more cheery and optimistic than the usual austere dystopian-future fodder, feels like two ideas crudely stapled together. It also slogs along past the 100-minute mark, when 89 would have been more than enough time to not develop its ideas and characters fully.

Perhaps we should chalk this up as generational differences – Moonshot just failed to Zoomer-com its way into my Xer heart, which forever deems Notting Hill the gold standard for rom-coms, will never be won over by blabbering doofuses like Sprouse’s character and considers WALL-E the greatest interstellar romance put on film, and so, so much preferable to Walt and Sophie’s trite it’s-not-a-courtship crapola. At one point, Walt fears being outed as a stowaway, and asserts, if he’s caught, “Have them eject me towards the sun.” Don’t mind if I do, hoss.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Moonshot looks different than your usual rom-com, but delivers the same old story.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.