My Review of "Moonshot"

Moonshot is the latest HBO Max movie that came out in 2022. For all intents and purposes this is quite a generic romantic comedy. They didn't even need the space aspect of the movie to complete this film. The space aspect was a nice little twist to spice things up.

The movie starts up with this character Walt in the year 2049. He's a hopeless dreamer that wants to go to Mars. Why Mars? Well because it's a far off place full of wonder. This technically could have been any country in the world but he chose to go the next level.

Walt has been applying to go to Mars forever and has been shot down 37 times. Unfortunately for him trips to Mars now happen once a year and he has a narrow window to make it there.

One of Walt's friends gets him to come to a party. At the party Walt pretty much bores everyone with his talks about Mars. He tries to chat with everyone and meets two people with polar opposite reactions to him. A girl named Sophie that hates his guts and a girl named Ginny who becomes his girlfriend.

Ginny moves to Mars but keeps up with Walt whereas Sophie stays on Earth hoping to once again reunite with her boyfriend on Mars. Through a series of weird convenient events Walt discovers a method where he can sneak onto a shuttle to Mars. Unfortunately for him Sophie is the key to his plan.

Basically he uses Sophie in order to finally get to Mars so that he can meet up with Ginny. Sophie tries to get over her fears of flying to get to her boyfriend Calvin. You know where this is going when I even describe what is happening.

Yes the story is quite predictable and you can pretty much tell where everything is going to end up probably twenty minutes into the movie. Still that's not the point of these movies. Romantic comedies have never been the movies to throw you for a loop because they're formulaic for a reason. They're comfort viewing.

This movie relies on the charisma of its star characters Walt and Sophie and the two do a relatively good job at keeping us interested. Although I was more interested in the characters I didn't totally buy the chemistry between the two. It felt a little too unnatural. That made for streaming movie feel definitely hits this movie hard. It's almost as if this should have been a TV show rather than a movie.

With that said they still had some interesting special effects that helped push the space aspects of this movie. There is a sense of wonder with the fact that they're in the vastness of space. I wished that they had placed a few more obstacles in the way since they were in space. They could have added a few more realistic dangers in this movie. This probably would have solidified more of our understanding of their relation to one another as they would have survived a life or death experience.

There are a lot of elements to this movie that had a lot of potential. I think that they touched upon a few of those aspects but played it safe for some reason. That's too bad because they could have really made this movie one to look out for.

Overall, I would say that the charisma of the two main characters is interesting. Unfortunately I didn't really buy into the chemistry between the two. It's still a fun ride in terms of romantic comedies but I wouldn't rank this above average. That's why I have to give this movie a 5.5 out of 10. It's too bad because I saw so much potential in this one.