Tom Cruise’s movie shot in space could be science fiction’s Boyhood

Tom Cruise wants to shoot a movie in outer space.

Somethings you just can’t make up. Tom Cruise wants to shoot a movie in outer space. An actual movie, in actual out space. Sometimes the man is so nutty you think he’s a candy bar. Yet, with space travel actually starting to become a thing that the average (millionaire) person can do, there’s no real reason why Cruise can’t make this idea come to fruition.

Heck, Universal Studios is interested in being involved in said film idea. NASA has confirmed this is a real thing and that the “action movie” would take place mostly in the International Space Station. SpaceX, the company Elon Musk runs, would be part of the film’s development, seeing as Cruise would need to get to the ISS and back.

Assuming Cruise makes this movie, what can we really expect from it? It won’t be John Wick in space, after all, you need gravity to have really good combat. You can’t really do any explosions in space, because, you know, the whole decompression thing. So practical effects are out. You also really can’t leap around or slam into anything too much. Again, safety procedures. So what can you really do with a movie shot in space?

Make a pretty generic action-adventure film.

This sounds like the science fiction equivalent of the movie Boyhood. Boyhood is a typical movie about a kid growing up and dealing with all the trials and tribulations that a kid typically goes through. The story isn’t that unique, yet what made it so successful was instead of shooting a movie over the course of a few weeks and bringing in different actors to play the titular boy at different stages in life, the director opted to instead shoot the movie over years.

That’s right, for a few weeks every few years the director, cast, and crew would meet back up and shoot more scenes. So the young kid you see in the movie, Ellar Coltrane, is also the young man you see at the end of it. There are not many movies that have ever done that. If there are any others at all. When you see fellow co-stars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette age in the movie, they aren’t in a makeup chair to get the effect. They’ve actually aged.

That’s the hook. Watch real people age 12 years in the course of 90 minutes.

That’s also essentially the hook for Cruise’s movie, “come watch Tom Cruise really float around outer space!”

So it’s really irrelevant if the script is any good or if there’s any real action because it’ll be praised for largely being the first movie of it’s kind. So critics will think it’s good regardless. It might be really good, it might be just average. It might tell a story we’ve seen a hundred times, like Boyhood, but the fact it’s actually in outer space might be all the hook it needs.

Who knows?