At first glance, Disney’s Crater seemingly has a lot going for it. A sci-fi coming-of-age adventure in the vein of 1980s hits like Stand By Me and The Goonies, the film taps into nostalgia for adults of a certain age while offering contemporary kids a vision of an analog future. And with a producorial team that accounts for major blockbusters like Night at the Museum, Free Guy, and Netflix’s Stranger Things, you would expect Crater to achieve a similar level of heart, humor, and suspense. Sadly, it does not.
(Disney)
Set in the far-off future, humans have established a lunar mining colony where indentured servants are working off years of debt for their freedom. Meanwhile, the wealthy and elite get to move away from Earth, which is never shown in the film, to a new planet called Omega. A trip to Omega takes over 70 Earth years in a frozen state, so departing for the new world is a guaranteed parting from your loved ones left behind. Such is the situation that recently orphaned teenager Caleb Channing (Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Family Reunion) finds himself in.
Before his death, Caleb’s father, Michael (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi, Westworld), told his son about a remote crater with something wonderful Caleb should see before he is transferred to Omega. In an act of rebellion, Caleb and his friends – Addison (Mckenna Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale), Dylan (Billy Barratt, Mary Poppins Returns), Borney (Orson Hong, Only Murders in the Building), and Marcus (Thomas Boyce, Neuroblast) – commandeer a rover and set out to see what awaits them on this last hurrah before Caleb leaves Earth’s moon. While the journey is for Caleb, they each discover something about themselves that will help shape their future.
Crater’s biggest issue is its erratic pacing. The core cast of young actors is charismatic and intriguing enough to hold your attention, but there’s a lot of slowly delivered exposition, primarily through flashbacks, that frequently grind things to a halt. Some of the characters feel like nothing more than a checkbox in a quest to pay homage to the 1980s films they were designed to emulate rather than an essential part of a team, with Barney and Marcus feeling particularly underserved on the adventure. The story’s slow burn likely would’ve worked well on the big screen three decades ago, but with in-home streaming as the film’s final destination, I foresee a majority of the film’s intended audience giving up on it before the credits begin to roll, and even the adult audience is likely to feel that Crater is too weighed down by heavy material.
The film’s greatest strengths are its production design, with a practical lunar colony that looks more like government-funded terrestrial buildings than anything a futurist would dream up. This is a push-button world that will instantly take adult viewers back to simpler times when a cracked screen didn’t render a device inoperable. Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez (The Stanford Prison Experiment) lends his independent filmmaker sensibilities to halcyon moments of joyful youth, while also serving the drama of the screenplay by John Griffin (From). But the producing team, with all their family-friendly successes to their names, likely needed to get more involved to help this team of auteur filmmakers better land the tone of a film with as wide-sweeping of a target audience as this.
Ultimately, Crater is too heavy-handed with a story of loss that doesn’t really let up. Caleb lost his mother when he was a child, and just lost his father as he enters his turbulent teenage years. Faced with losing his found family and his best friends via his transfer to Omega, viewers are constantly reminded that no matter what this excursion to a crater holds, this is the final chapter in a series of sad partings for the main character. The resolution does little to ease up on the heavy-handed message, and Crater ultimately feels hollow for it.
I give Crater 2 out of 5 lunar high jumps.
Crater is now streaming exclusively on Disney+.