USA. 2023.
Crew
Director – Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Screenplay – John Griffin, Producers – Dan Cohen, Dan Levine & Shawn Levy, Photography – Jas Shelton, Music – Osei Essed & Dan Romer, Visual Effects Supervisor – Carey Villegas, Visual Effects – FX3X (Supervisor – Aleksandar Vishemirski) & MPC (Supervisors – Nicholas Aithadi, Eddy Moussa, Matt Jacobs & Ralph Maiers), Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Hawker, Production Design – Nora Takacs Ekberg. Production Company – Disney/21 Laps.
Cast
Isaiah Russell-Bailey (Caleb Channing), McKenna Grace (Addison), Billy Barratt (Dylan), Orson Hong (Borney), Thomas Boyce (Marcus), Scott Mescudi (Michael Channing), Selenis Levya (Maria Slater)
Plot
The year 2255. Caleb Channing lives on The Moon. His father was working a twenty-year contract as a miner, which at the end would have earned him passage to the new colony that has been established on the planet Omega, but was killed on the job. His father always made Caleb promise that he would travel out to visit a remote crater. With the moonbase about to go into lockdown during a meteor shower, Caleb persuades three friends to steal a moon rover and head out to see what is at the crater. To do so, they require the codes to open the outer doors of the rover garage. However, the only person they can get them from is Addison, a girl newly arrived from Earth whose father works in the garage. She agrees on the condition that she can come along with them. They successfully make it out onto the lunar surface in the rover. The journey becomes a perilous one but also one where they bond over the dangers they experience.
Crater was the fourth film for Kyle Patrick Alvarez who had previously made the romantic comedy Easier With Practice (2009) and the comedy C.O.G. (2013). I had been quite impressed with Alvarez’s third film The Stanford Prison Experiment (2016). The film was produced for the Disney Channel by Shawn Levy, director of Night and the Museum (2006) and sequels, Real Steel (2011) and Free Guy (2021), and his 21 Laps production company. The film comes with a script from John Griffin, creator of tv’s From (2022- ).
I had a good deal of scepticism about watching a film produced for the Disney Channel – some of the stuff made for them is utterly banal. It took some way in for me to warm up to Crater, but when it did it was a surprisingly good Coming of Age story. The film does have the benefit of some excellent effects, especially the scenes touring the uncompleted lunar city and those with the group fooling around and joyriding using air tanks.
There are a number of quibbles that one can make about the science, making this an example of Bad Science. In one of the early scenes, Isaiah Russell-Bailey expresses fear about falling from a platform. However, on The Moon there is one-sixth less of Earth’s gravity so any fall he had, especially in an air-pressurised environment, should be less a fall than a gentle drift to the ground.
The biggest issue throughout is the on/off lunar gravity. The characters walk around inside the lunar city and the rover as though they were in regular Earth gravity. On the other hand, once they exit the rover, lunar gravity is suddenly back on and they are doing low-gravity leaps (while somehow managing to knock a rock into escape velocity during an impromptu baseball game – something that requires it reaching a speed of about 1.5 miles per second).
Another piece of idiocy is the lack of an airlock on the rover ie. as soon as the characters exit into the lunar void in their spacesuits, all of the air inside the vehicle would be ejected and wasted. Given that air conservancy is an issue for them, this seems a serious design flaw. The meteor shower also causes the sounds of explosive impact when the rocks strike the lunar surface in a supposed void.
However, by about the halfway point, the film develops some undeniable charms. Some of these come in the dialogue between McKenna Grace and the other kids curious about life on Earth, which they have never experienced, in contrast to their life in servitude and poverty on the Moon; or of her failed attempt to introduce them to playing baseball on the lunar surface. The film achieves a certain magic in the scenes where the group have fun by using air tanks as a series of jet packs to fly up off the surface. The latter sections allow the characters to be explored with some depth, while the final scenes of the film have quite a poignance.
Trailer here