Martian melodrama 'The Space Between Us' crashes to Earth

There are movies about the wonders of space travel -- a short list would include "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Solaris" and "Interstellar" -- that seek to test the audience's perceptual limits, altering our sense of time and place so as to usher us into the vast frontier of the unknown. And then there are movies like "The Space Between Us" -- though happily, not too many -- which take the vast frontier of the unknown and whittle it down to something obvious, familiar and dispiritingly pocket-sized. I suppose it could be worse. The soundtrack, for all its loud surges of pop dreck, at least has the decency to omit a certain Dave Matthews Band song -- the one that goes "The space between / the tears we cry is the laughter keeps us coming back for more," which more or less sums up this movie's idea of a tonal strategy. You may very well laugh and cry during "The Space Between Us," though probably at the wrong times and for entirely unintended reasons.