Lucy in the Sky Parent Guide

Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) is one of the lucky few to make the cut as an astronaut and then to go into space, in her case, on the Space Shuttle servicing the International Space Station. But coming back to earth turns out to be more difficult than heading for the stars. Life on terra firma feels strangely flat, her marriage sputters, and she develops an interest in fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (John Hamm). From there, her life begins a downwards spiral…

This is a very weird movie. That’s just fine; I’m usually a big fan of weird movies, except that Lucy in the Sky is also crushingly dull. Lucy may have pulled eight times Earth’s gravity on a launch, but I felt like I had at least 30 Gs on my eyelids as I tried desperately to stay awake through the entire two hour runtime.

There are numerous issues that drag this film down, but the most noticeable is its aggravating cinematography. The movie is shot in an intermittent full-screen aspect ratio, which I wouldn’t normally find annoying, except it keeps switching between widescreen and fullscreen. No matter how you justify that from a narrative perspective, it’s still incredibly irritating. Combined with a narrow depth of field, it makes for an odd viewing experience, with the boundaries of the screen subject to change without notice, and objects phasing in and out of the narrow focus.

The film also fails on the plot – which should have been interesting in a true-crime-TV-movie-of-the-week kind of way. Loosely based on the real-life criminal exploits of Lisa Nowak, an astronaut who managed to blow up her personal life in similar circumstances, it’s not a bad story. The problem is….everything else. The dialogue is flat and often odd, and the pacing is brutally slow. This does a real disservice to a talented cast, who have been launched into the void by poor screenwriting and directing.

If you’re thinking of watching this movie with teenagers, you’ll be wondering if the R rating is merited. The answer is, “Pretty much.”. There are two scenes of adulterous sex, one involving an activity we can’t describe on a family website. There is also more drinking than parents will like, and it’s more than a little disconcerting to see what appears to be half the staff at NASA getting drunk during the day. I’d be less nervous if they weren’t responsible for launching things into orbit.

I tried really hard to like this movie - which was a mistake. It kept me awake for longer than I would have liked. But I’m a sucker for movies about space, and I hoped that at some point the soap-opera drama and general strangeness would take a backseat to really anything else. Instead, the only thing in the backseat was an unstable married astronaut with a high-school crush on a co-worker and all the restraint of your neighborhood meth addict. Not exactly the out-of-this-world space movie I was looking for.