I was highly disappointed by the new HBO Max movie Moonshot.

Lana Candor, who is most commonly known from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Cole Sprouse played the two most annoying characters to cross my screen in a few months. I was not expecting to burn with hate for every line delivered by these too realistic, yet unrealistic stereotype messes. 

These two college students Sophie (Candor) and Walt (Sprouse) set out to Mars as Walt is a stowaway stuck in the same room as Sophie. This is a typical trope to find main characters in; from the get-go I was aware that they would fall hopelessly in love. Most of the time I would watch the love story play out and call out when they would finally share a kiss with excitement. However, I found throughout this movie that I was instead yelling: they don’t know each other well enough and they need to slow down.

I was largely annoyed by the characters, and my annoyance kept my attention more than the plot could ever hope of achieving. The whole plot of the movie is to not get caught sneaking Walt onto the ship, yet they change his name to an existing character and prance around the ship as though the multiple geniuses on the flight who also have access the to the internet won’t put together Walt is not Calvin—Sophie’s long-distance boyfriend played by Mason Gooding. By the end of the movie, the plot became irrelevant and it focused on the boring mid-life crisis these twenty or so year old characters were having. 

The one good thing about the movie was the set. The orange cliffs on mars were gorgeous and made me want to go for a hike. The space-themed bedrooms on the ship and on mars were just beautiful and perfectly modern, yet futuristic. The set was by far the most appealing part of the waste of an hour and forty-four minutes they call a movie. 

Part of the set was the trash on earth and this was one message in the movie that could have been executed better. We need to take care of our planet, we will never find another one like it. In the movie, every corner of the earth is covered in trash—not a far stretch from our own earth—and the people who live on mars even send their trash back to earth. Sophie wants to save the earth and throughout her screen time, in the first half of the movie she brings up her plans to rid the planet of waste, but as the plot progresses it is brought up as more as I belong on earth, not everyone should be on earth and we should save our dying planet. The characters see no problem leaving the planet as a wreck and only the richest or smartest can escape it. This is the most realistic part of the movie and another call to action. Well Moonshot was overall a disappointment and a bore, the main message I took away was that earth is irreplaceable, and Mars is intriguing but won’t save everyone.