Inside Film

Lucy in the Sky has bombed at the US box office – why do some space films fail to take off?

The prestige project starring Natalie Portman is only the latest in a very long line of galactic misfires, says Geoffrey Macnab, including ‘Jupiter Ascending’ and ‘Passenger’

Thursday 05 December 2019 18:57 GMT
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Natalie Portman as abrasive astronaut Lucy Cola
Natalie Portman as abrasive astronaut Lucy Cola

Early on in the new film Lucy in the Sky, astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) is shown floating in space, looking down at the world below. From her vantage point, planet Earth looks very small and puny. She doesn’t want her time in the heavens to end. She has never felt so alive.

Back in the real world of school runs, office politicking and domestic drudgery, the astronaut feels both depressed and disoriented. The trip to space, she later recalls, was the best time in her life.

But in spite of a cast that includes Portman, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm as Lucy’s arrogant lover and Downton Abbeys Dan Stevens, as her naively trusting Nasa publicist husband, Lucy in the Sky has crashed and burned at the US box office. The reviews have been negative: “F***ing dreadful”, “a collision of misguided aesthetics and rotten screenwriting”, and “It’s hard to know why anyone thought it would make a good movie” are some of the opinions among US critics, while The Independent, who gave it two stars, says director Noah Hawley “often drowns his star in unnecessary visual trickery”.

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