Red Rover: 'Meeting cute' while planning the ultimate in self-isolation on Mars
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B minus
There’s something to be said for the future on a tight budget.
Shane Belcourt’s space-travel rom-com, Red Rover, falls into a wave of lo-fi sci-fi indie films, that genre of the last decade or so that explores time-travel, aliens and space travel as thought experiments rather than expensive action spectacles.
Examples include Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess and recent Canadian films, Akash Sherman’s Clara and Jeremy LaLonde’s James Vs. His Future Self.
Kristian Bruun and Cara Gee find a new use for a space pod in Red Rover.
The premise of Red Rover is that an Elon Musk-like billionaire investor has decided to launch a Mars mission, combined with a reality show. The team of four travelers is to be chosen in concert by “selection acclaim,” and “popular acclaim,” based on their video auditions.
One of the applicants is Damon, a shlubby thirty-something, living in the basement of his ex-girlfriend (Meghan Heffern), who has loud sex every night with her freeloading boyfriend (Morgan David Jones). After Damon gets fired from his geologist job by his macho, environment-hating boss (Joshua Peace) he’s out on the beach one day, with his metal detector where he meets Phoebe (Cara Gee).
She’ a manically-upbeat street musician who he first meets on the beach where she’s dressed as an astronaut, handing out flyers for the Red Rover mission. In no time, she’s working as his collaborator and chief cheerleader, who even takes him to a rave and then a carnival to help him loosen up.
What a fire-cracker! Cara Gee’s Phoebe character, power-flirts with such intensity, I initially assumed she was either an hallucination or a con artist.
Forced fun aside, Red Rover is certainly watchable. It has a pleasing DIY look, mixing grainy stock footage (NASA, Shutterstock) with crisp earthbound cinematography. There’s a nicely grounded performance from Kristian Bruun (Orphan Black, Murdoch Mysteries), some decent moments of deadpan comic dialogue, and a premise so outlandish you want to see it worked through.
Where it sputters and stalls eventually is in the rehashed rom-com elements. There’s a long history of Hollywood movies about beautiful emotionally unstable women who fall for introverted, unsuccessful men, when they recognize they’re so deep-down nice.
There’s a female version of romancing out of your league (the Cinderella story), but the Beauty and the Nerd stories tend to involve more self-pity and anger. Damon’s great virtue, recognized even by his unfaithful partner, is that he’s so committed - which can to be a nice way of saying obsessed.
In recent years, we’re more inclined to recognize the more sinister elements in these movies about involuntarily celibate men. I sometimes think that two of my favourite lonely guy movies, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (both released in 1960) had more in common than I care to admit.
Read Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Red Rover star Kristian Bruun HERE.
Red Rover. Directed by Shane Belcourt. Written by Shane Belcourt and Duane Murray. Starring: Kristian Bruun and Cara Gee. Red Rover is available on digital and video-on demand.