The old saying goes you shouldn’t marry anyone you can’t stand to be with for a three-day train ride. This is perhaps the basis for most of Richard Linklater’s Before series, tracing a couple from initial courtship to eventual marriage, from the fantasy of being young and taking a different path to settling into comfort. Kristian Mercado’s fluffy and sweet hang-out movie If You Were the Last initially opens in a living room before we pull back to reveal that our couple, Adam (Anthony Mackie) and Jane (Zoe Chao), are floating ruthlessly in space, on a self-sustaining ship that has lost all navigation and communication with NASA back on earth. Like an extreme version of the Before series, we enter mid-relationship, after the routines have been established 1,000 days into a solidly platonic relationship.
Adam and Jane are set in their schedules: completing the checklist, caring for the garden and animals,...
Adam and Jane are set in their schedules: completing the checklist, caring for the garden and animals,...
- 3/27/2023
- by John Fink
- The Film Stage
Hooray! A romantic comedy that revives the screwball formula where two people talk themselves silly — and we only had to go to the end of the solar system to make it happen. Adam (Anthony Mackie) and Jane (Zoë Chao) are the sole surviving astronauts on a ship with no navigation and no communication system able to transmit their grievances to their NASA superiors who presumably think them dead. How long have they been adrift? Three years. How literal is the title “If You Were the Last”? Very.
But Kristian Mercado, making his narrative debut after directing a string of stand-up specials, and Angela Bourassa, who wrote the Black List-hailed screenplay, haven’t made a film about settling for the nearest sexual organ. Instead, the swooning comes from watching these platonic shipmates debate why they should, and shouldn’t, settle — only to realize that their ability to have these frank...
But Kristian Mercado, making his narrative debut after directing a string of stand-up specials, and Angela Bourassa, who wrote the Black List-hailed screenplay, haven’t made a film about settling for the nearest sexual organ. Instead, the swooning comes from watching these platonic shipmates debate why they should, and shouldn’t, settle — only to realize that their ability to have these frank...
- 3/12/2023
- by Amy Nicholson
- Variety Film + TV
If Wes Anderson and Nancy Meyers joined forces to remake the 2016 sci-fi drama Passengers, the result would be something like If You Were the Last, a vivid but overly cute feature debut from director Kristian Mercado that premiered at SXSW.
Anthony Mackie and Zoë Chao star as a pair of astronauts stranded aboard a NASA shuttle that gets lost in space, and their decent onscreen chemistry helps fuel a rom-com tackling questions of fidelity, friendship and, well, fornication, as the would-be couple endlessly drifts through the cosmos. Backed by a colorful DIY aesthetic that makes the most of its budget, the film is nonetheless sappy and, in terms of its comedy, rather cringe-worthy, never quite finding the sweet spot between romance and laughs.
Written by Angela Bourassa, the high-concept story is purposely low-fi from the start, revealing how Adam (Mackie) and Jane (Chao), two highly trained space explorers, are stuck...
Anthony Mackie and Zoë Chao star as a pair of astronauts stranded aboard a NASA shuttle that gets lost in space, and their decent onscreen chemistry helps fuel a rom-com tackling questions of fidelity, friendship and, well, fornication, as the would-be couple endlessly drifts through the cosmos. Backed by a colorful DIY aesthetic that makes the most of its budget, the film is nonetheless sappy and, in terms of its comedy, rather cringe-worthy, never quite finding the sweet spot between romance and laughs.
Written by Angela Bourassa, the high-concept story is purposely low-fi from the start, revealing how Adam (Mackie) and Jane (Chao), two highly trained space explorers, are stuck...
- 3/12/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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