CRATER (2023)

Theatrical or Streaming?  Not a hard call for movie execs on this Disney Dystopia teenage space adventure.  (A mid-50s budget may sound skimpy for CGI-infected Sci-Fi, but with no-name leads, not so cheap.)  Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez/writer John Griffin, effectively in feature debuts, imagine Earth, a few centuries on, as pretty much toast, while an active Lunar Colony mines fuel for trips to the New World of Planet Omega.  Only a select few qualify, but kids of miners who died on the job win the coveted ‘E-ticket.’   That’s the setup for five teen pals who plan a last wild wknd* before their orphaned pal begins the 75-yr suspended animation trip they’ll never take.  So, naturally with a meteor shower forecast, they steal a Moon Rover to head out for lunar fun & games: low-gravity baseball with rocks  (we laugh at air leaks!); gas-boosted bungee cord blastoffs (boing; you’re in outer space); oxygen tank wasting gags; trashing the interior of the ‘model home’ that saved you with supplies; bury an ash capsule of Dad’s remains next to the ash capsule of Mom (heck, all caring fathers send their teenage sons on sentimental suicide missions, right?); et al.  A MasterClass on Teenage Irresponsibility.  Maybe if the kids weren’t meant to remind us of better past teen actors (the girl/Emma Watson; the pretty boy/Leo DiCaprio; the scaredy-cat Asian/Ke Huy Quan; the two Black teens more original as twenty/thirty years ago they likely wouldn’t have been cast . . . Progress!).  Unimaginative visually as it is in character, the film’s a tear-begging cheat.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *A good bet THE GOONIES/’85 was an early fave of Alvarez & Griffin.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-goonies-1985.html