Taking Off With Moonshot

Christopher Winterbauer’s future-set “Moonshot” is built around a familiar, hard-to-resist premise, most often found in sitcoms but with roots in 1930s screwball comedies: a man and a woman who don’t get along must pretend to be romantically involved for the purpose of an elaborate ruse, the advancement of which gradually brings them closer together until they fall in love for real.

The man is Walt (Cole Sprouse), a guileless, accident-prone barista who yearns to visit Mars, and the woman is Sophie (Lana Condor), an anxious Ph.D. candidate en route to Mars herself. When Walt stows away on Sophie’s space shuttle, he assumes the identity of her longtime boyfriend Calvin (Mason Gooding), and manages to embroil her in the deception. The trip to the red planet takes a month. Walt and Sophie have to spend it sharing quarters, keeping up amorous appearances, and (of course) exchanging the kind of witty banter and increasingly lustful glances that in a rom-com are the foundation of any budding relationship… read more >