Directors – Josh Gordon & Will Speck, Screenplay – Spenser Cohen, Producers – Fred Berger, Anna Halberg & Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Photography – Jeff Cutter, Music – Steven Price, Visual Effects Supervisor – Lindy De Quattro, Visual Effects – Atomic Arts (Supervisor – Clwyd Edwards), Boxel Studio (Supervisor – Ricardo Camacho), Mr. X (Supervisor – Chris Uyede), Rotoout VFX Private Limited & RVX, Spectral (Supervisor – Gergely Takacs), Special Effects Supervisor – Gabor ‘Gege’ Kiszelly, Creature Design – Neville Page, Production Design – Andrew Bennett & Todd Cherniawsky. Production Company – Automatik.
Cast
Anthony Ramos (Andy Ramirez), Naomi Scott (Naomi Calloway), Kristofer Hivju (Dawyne), Zachary Quinto (Voice of L.E.O.N.A.R.D.)
Plot
The mining ship Borealis is struck by debris as it passes through an asteroid field. Andy Ramirez abruptly comes around from cryosleep as his escape pod is ejected and lands on a nearby planet. He emerges to find a hostile world with an unbreathable atmosphere and vicious creatures roaming the surface. He encounters one other survivor Dwayne who is setting up an emergency beacon, only for Dwayne to be attacked by the creatures. Andy’s suit is low on oxygen due a tear sustained during the crash. He locates one other survivor Naomi Calloway, trapped in her escape pod several kilometres away. Getting to her requires that Andy makes a trek across hostile terrain and avoiding the creatures, all before his oxygen supply runs out.
Long Distance was a script that showed a good deal of promise – it was originally brought to be produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions. The script is from Spenser Cohen who also wrote Extinction (2018), Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall (2022), Expend4bles (2023) and Tarot (2024). After passing through several hands, the directors eventually assigned were the team of Josh Gordon and Will Speck who had previously worked together on the mainstream comedies Blades of Glory (2007), The Switch (2010) and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2022).
I regularly use the term Planetary Adventure on this site to describes SF works that take place on a colourful world of exotic flora and fauna and usually pockets of alien civilisation. Such would include works like Flash Gordon (1936), Avatar (2009) and John Carter (2012), which emphasize the adventure aspect. You could also create another subset of these that are works of Planetary Survival where the focus in on the struggle to survive in a harsh and hostile world. You could include here works like Enemy Mine (1985), Pitch Black (2000) and Atlas (2024). Long Distance definitely falls into the latter category.
There is a good deal that has gone into Long Distance. It has a reasonable budget thrown at it and some high-profile names on the production side. Directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck certainly get in a few tense and jump-out-of-your-seat moments with the large ungainly creatures slamming about and ferociously pursuing people. Here the film draws on a bunch of films that have derived from Alien (1979), but where the alien creature has been reconceived as a giant spider-like being.
Anthony Ramos on the planet’s surface
However, I was constantly getting jerked out of my believability in the world by basic entry-level scientific blunders – an asteroid belt where the asteroids are visible and within spitting distance of each other; a crash where we are told that Anthony Ramos’s capsule is moving at 15,000 mph yet makes a re-entry crash into the ground that barely dents the soil – I’ve seen 50 mph vehicle pile-ups that cause more damage. (A little back of the napkin calculation estimates that an object about the size of a small car travelling at such a speed would leave a crater 1400 feet in diameter and 280 feet deep, not taking into effect any atmospheric braking). Or the climactic scene with Anthony Ramos dropping down onto one of the creatures in a survival pod in the cargo deck where he somehow doesn’t end up with a broken neck or major whiplash.
One of the big minuses of Long Distance is also the casting of Anthony Ramos. Now Ramos comes with an impressive cv that includes appearance in Broadway’s Hamilton (2015) and as a recording artist and has been in a number of other reasonable profile films. On screen however, he delivers an incredibly annoying hero, one who has zero survival skills and is constantly tripping over his own feet making rookie mistakes and then constantly complaining about it. He’s such a whiny crybaby hero, you want to bitch slap him in the middle of action and tell him to sort himself out.
