Matt Damon might have had to survive for months on Mars in The Martian, but in The Space Between Us, the Red Planet is all that Asa Butterfield has known. Check out his first trip back to Earth in the film's trailer.
Directed by Peter Chelsom from Allan Loeb's script, the drama finds Butterfield as Gardner Elliot, the unexpected extra crew member on a mission to Mars carried there by his mother Sarah (Janet Montgomery). When she dies in childbirth, he's raised on the planet by the science team and grows to be a teenager knowing little of Earth but what he reads and watches and raised by the small crew around him.
He does have one other connection to the blue marble that his parents called home: Tulsa (Britt Robertson), a young woman he strikes up a friendship with over video chats. When the science team in charge of the mission, led by Gary Oldman's Nathaniel Shepherd brings Gardner home for tests, he breaks out of the lab to see Tulsa and goes on a romantic adventure. There's just one problem... His body just isn't suited to life on our planet.
With Carla Gugino and B.D. Wong (who really shouldn't be allowed near the lad, lest he splice his DNA with a dinosaur or something) also in the cast, The Space Between Us will be out on August 19.