Crater
Any technological revolution is built on the back of the workers who make it happen, be it the construction of railroads crossing continents, the miners who dig coal for power stations, or a generation later for the rare metals for micro components and batteries, or still later for helium on the Moon, the initial contract twenty years before passage to the distant planet Omega is paid off but in reality much longer as every default adds time, and if a dependent child reaches eighteen they become an adult and must earn their own way rather than travelling with their parents.
Four friends who have grown up together, Dylan, Borney and Marcus must say goodbye to Caleb; his father killed in a mining accident, the terms of the contract pay off his debt and send his son to the stars, but in his last days on the Moon he wishes to fulfil the request his father made of him to travel across the surface to a specific crater for reasons he refused to explain. With an incoming meteor shower placing the base on lockdown, Dylan knows new girl in town Addison can get the codes to access a rover and thinks they can be on their way before anyone can stop them.
With the young cast of Billy Barratt, Orson Hong, Thomas Boyce, Isaiah Russell-Bailey and Mckenna Grace, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’ Crater at times seems to resemble “my first science fiction adventure,” with five plucky children on a lunar quest without adult supervision or, seemingly, the barest awareness of the dangers of vacuum or any knowledge of safety procedures which should have been drilled into them since their earliest childhood, Woody Woodpecker training films presumably having been abandoned before 2257.
The danger of the incoming meteor shower brushed off by Dylan – the only white male in the group so naturally assuming the role of leader, bullying Addison into submission when she challenges his behaviour – the selfish and irresponsible gang are wasteful of precious resources, using oxygen tanks for larks, gorging themselves on food from a shelter they break into then wrecking it out of spite when the mood takes them, apparently incapable of differentiating between right and wrong.
Yet buried beneath the regolith there are the traces of ideas which might have made for a more interesting film, perhaps even a subversive call for socialism which might have been more prominent had John Griffin’s script not languished for the best part of a decade before production was greenlit by the corporate beast called Disney, the background of class division, indentured servitude and the children who inherit it apparent but any deep discussion as carefully avoided as an explanation of why the gravity in the base is Earth normal, why the rover has no airlock or why any reasonable parent would demand such a promise from a child in the first place.
The young cast perhaps indicating that the film is primarily aimed at children, that does the target audience a disservice with the presumption that they deserve to be treated as idiots and in fact the film would have played better had the protagonists displayed more maturity, particularly the insufferable brat Dylan, and while the production values are superb with half-constructed cities of soaring metal arcs demonstrating the squandered promise of the Moon, Crater is more defined by what has been scooped out than by the shape of what remains.
Crater is available on Disney+ now
