Film Review: Crater takes the road-trip trope into deep space

"The life-or-death nature of their epic adventure, as the meteors pound down and the teens run low on oxygen, invests the story with enough tension and momentum to keep the tale rattling along"

Sat, 13 May, 2023 - 17:00

Declan Burke

Crater
★★☆☆☆

Set in a mining colony on the moon in the year 2257, Crater (PG) opens with the recently orphaned teenager Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey) facing a relocation to the planet Omega.

Determined to make good on a promise he made to his father, Caleb and his friends Dylan (Billy Barratt), Marcus (Thomas Boyce) and Borney (Orson Hong), along with the ‘spoiled little Earth girl’ Addison (Mckenna Grace), steal a lunar rover and break out of the colony onto the lunar surface for the very first time. So far, so good — except their escape was easy because the rest of colony is in lockdown due to the 72-hour meteor shower that’s due any moment.

(L-R): Isaiah Russell-Bailey as Caleb, Mckenna Grace as Addison, Orson Hong as Borney, Thomas Boyce as Marcus and Billy Barratt as Dylan in Crater.

Written by John Griffin and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Crater is effectively a teen road-trip movie that acknowledges the sci-fi conventions whilst Caleb & Co. get busy with the real business of a road-trip — i.e., bickering and squabbling, and forging life-long bonds, etc.

The life-or-death nature of their epic adventure, as the meteors pound down and the teens run low on oxygen, invests the story with enough tension and momentum to keep the tale rattling along, and there are good performances from Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Mckenna Grace, and particularly Billy Barratt, whose idealistic Dylan is the wild-eyed outlaw of the bunch.

(Disney+)

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