Movie Review: A Trip To The Moon

Obsessed with the Moon and Apollo 11’s mission to it, geeky young outsider Tomas (Angelo Mutti Spinetta) yearns for his sexy older neighbour Iris (Angela Torres) who he glimpses through his telescope while scanning the night sky, their mutual attraction growing into a sensitive friendship. 

Still traumatised by a childhood incident and forced to regularly meet with laidback psychiatrist Dr Livenson (Luis Machin), Tomas’s desire to escape his mundane reality and fracturing family life eventually leads him to quit taking his antipsychotic medication and start planning his own trip to the Moon. But, as fantasy bleeds into reality and he closes in on the point of no return, can Iris tempt him back to the real world…?

It’s a pretty ballsy move naming your debut feature after Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic Le voyage dans la lune, perhaps one of the most influential films ever made. It’s even ballsier to also ape it’s most iconic image; the Moon with a human face, writer/director Joaquin Cambre superimposing the face of Tomas’s unrequited love Iris on the Moon in order to lure the teenager away from reality. It’s just a shame then that there’s little else so audacious in A Trip To The Moon, a beautifully shot but by the numbers coming of age drama with a magical realist twist, the film feeling like the work of an earnest young South American exchange student who just spent a couple of weeks on a study visit to Wes Anderson’s house.

The performances are decent with Torres the standout and while Cambre has a fantastic eye, a raucous teen party a particular highlight, his script feels calculatedly quirky and his handling of the film’s mental health issues lacks sensitivity, has all the subtlety of an A-Team episode, Cambre shying away from the dark shadows at the story’s heart.

Attractively shot and mildly amusing, A Trip To The Moon is ultimately as lacking in atmosphere as the dead, airless space rock obsessing it’s outsider hero.