CRATER - Mark Reviews Movies

Crater, Walt Disney Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 12, 2023

By the year 2257, generations of people have lived and mostly worked on the moon. That's the back story of Crater, which makes a convincing case for the futuristic world it imagines. It's simply too bad the movie's story bypasses most of the elements that make this world so intriguing and believable.

Instead, John Griffin's screenplay offers up a bittersweet road trip tale about a group of kids who learn some things about themselves and each other along the way. There's definitely some novelty to the notion of a leisurely trek across the lunar surface serving as the backdrop for something so familiar, but the movie hints at ideas much deeper and more consequential than the simple tale on display.

It starts with a brief flash-forward to a group of five kids sneaking into the garage of a lunar mining colony to "borrow" a rover while the rest of the base is distracted by an imminent lockdown. The kids are Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey), Dylan (Billy Barratt), Addison (Mckenna Grace), Borney (Orson Hong), and Marcus (Thomas Boyce), although only the first three really matter in any meaningful way to the story and themes Griffin is conveying. The other two are either comic relief or a plot complication waiting to happen.

As we soon learn from a flashback to earlier in the day, Caleb's father was killed while mining for helium, and as part of the death benefits granted to the dad's next of kin, Caleb is scheduled to be transported from the moon to the utopian paradise of the faraway planet Omega. The trip will take 75 years, meaning Caleb will be placed in a cryogenic sleep, but since his friends will still be on the moon, they all will be old or dead by the time he arrives.

Given only a few days before his journey begins, Caleb decides this is the last opportunity he has to fulfill a promise, detailed in additional flashbacks, he made to his father (played by Scott Mescudi). Dad wanted to take his son to a specific crater on the moon's surface—a place that meant so much to the boy's late mother and that the father wanted him to see before, in theory, the two of them would leave for Omega together. None of that happened, of course, so here's the last chance Caleb has to do that and to have one final adventure with his best friends.

Thus, we get that adventure. Griffin and director Kyle Patrick Alvarez use the setup to give us some wondrous sights of the vast lunar wasteland against the stars, a few sequences in which kids will be reckless and irresponsible kids even in a place with no atmosphere and low gravity, a lot of bickering and heart-to-heart moments between the friends, and some idea of how the mining operation functions, as well as how it shows humanity's ability to exploit people has continued a couple hundred years into the future.

The details of this future are fascinating—enough so that one wishes Griffin's screenplay had expanded upon and utilized them more fully into this story. Basically, Omega has become a refuge for Earth's wealthiest and most powerful people. The treks to that other planet are fueled by this mining operation, which has created a form of indentured servitude for workers in need of money and/or with dreams of going to Omega themselves.

All of this makes a terrible kind of sense, as does how the kids gradually pass by remnants of a lunar civilization that was once meant to be, only for humanity to give up on it entirely as soon as Omega was discovered. Certain aspects of this future are overlooked (mainly the state of Earth at the moment, although one can glean that it can't be too great with so many people wanting or trying to leave the planet), but every time Griffin's script introduces a new piece of information or concept about the mechanics of what this future is and how it functions, one can't help but want to know more.

This story, then, is ultimately disappointing, mostly because of the way the filmmakers eschew the most engaging conceits for these thin characters, this formulaic plotting, and maybe a bit too much unearned optimism in light of how dire the backdrop of this world is. To be sure, the kids are products of this world, aware of the problems but too caught up in them as the norm to have any idea of what could be done about them.

As the characters talk and bond over the course of their trip, they grow to realize some of the injustices here, especially with the perspective of Addison, who grew up on Earth and can give her new friends some outside context. It's not quite enough, especially when the movie itself presents the idea for a far more interesting story that occurs off-screen during its epilogue (That sequence is surprisingly affecting, although it, too, holds back on the reality of what's going on within it).

As a clever twist on a coming-of-age story revolving around a road trip, Crater is imaginative and performed quite well by its young cast. There are much bigger and more complex ideas here, though, and the juxtaposition of a fun adventure and the socioeconomic woes of this future world keeps everything off-balance.

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