Crew
Director/Screenplay – David Saperstein, Producer – Joseph Perez, Photography – John Bartley, Music – Geoff Levin & Chris Many, Visual Effects – Lumeni Productions, Inc, Special Effects Supervisor – Andrew Chamberlayne, Production Design – John J. Moore. Production Company – Five Star Entertainment.
Cast
Christian Slater (Eric Michaels), Martin Sheen (Paul Andrews), Olivia d’Abo (Mara Simons), Robert Foxworth (Richard Michaels), Sharon Stone (Laurie McCall), F. Murray Abraham (Dr Harry Bertram), Don [S.] Davis (Phil Clawson), Babs Chula (Anne Michaels), William Taylor (Dr Willis), Ilena Cary (Ellie Keller)
Plot
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, teenager Eric Michaels’ one ambition in life is to be an astronaut. He gets in trouble at school after a rocket he builds crashes into the building. Rather than be suspended, it is decided to send Eric to stay with his father Richard in Cedar Bay, Oregon. There Eric strikes up a connection and romance with local girl Mara Simons. She agrees to introduce Eric to his hero, former NASA astronaut Paul Andrews, the thirteenth man to walk on The Moon. Eric wants to know all about what being on The Moon was like but Paul has become a recluse and drinks a lot. Eric nevertheless persists and befriends Paul and helps him build a greenhouse. A friendship grows between the two, but this is endangered by Eric’s father who is insistent that there is no future in Eric’s obsession with space.
Beyond the Stars was the second directorial outing for David Saperstein, who had previously made the crime film A Killing Affair (1986). Saperstein was best known at the time for the novel on which Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985) was based. The only other works that Saperstein has been associated with have been a couple of short films about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live musical tour of all things. Beyond the Stars was not widely seen – it was shot in 1987 and sat on the shelf, before receiving a brief theatrical run in 1989 and then going straight to VHS. It does not appear to have had a dvd or digital release.
The surprise about Beyond the Stars, for a film that received little notice, is how well cast it is. The lead is Martin Sheen as the burned-out astronaut. Christian Slater was just on the cusp of breaking out at the time with roles in Heathers (1989) and Pump Up the Volume (1990) and plays the troubled teen with a dream to be an astronaut. Olivia d’Abo had debuted a couple of years earlier in Conan the Destroyer (1984) and had just become a regular on tv’s The Wonder Years (1988-93). There is Robert Foxworth as Slater’s father and Sharon Stone, still a few years before her breakout in Basic Instinct (1992), as Foxworth’s girlfriend. There’s also F. Murray Abraham, not long after Academy Award winning performance in Amadeus (1984), in a small role as an eccentric, whale-obsessed scientist confined to a wheelchair. You would have though that any of these would be a selling point for the film.
More than it is a film about NASA and the space program, Beyond the Stars is really a Coming of Age story. It follows a familiar path where misfit Christian Slater relocates to a new town, connects with a girl and then finds a mentor in Martin Sheen’s misanthropic, burned-out astronaut. As to be expected of this kind of film, Slater is defiant of parental desires for him to ‘take life seriously’ and both he and Sheen undergo an arc where they end up changing the other. All tried and true for this type of film. David Saperstein does nothing to particularly enervate it, although all the performances are solid with Martin Sheen standing out as the astronaut.
There is an interesting theme running through about the film’s depiction of NASA and the Space Program. Both Martin Sheen and Robert Foxworth’s characters decry the end of the Apollo space program and the Moon missions. In real life, NASA and the space program was not as doomed as they seemed to see it and was just undergoing a resurgence with the launch of the space shuttle. However, the space shuttle is dismissively passed off as just being a taxi, whereas in reality it was the future of NASA for the next three decades.
Beyond the Stars is of minimal interest in terms of genre material. Nevertheless, there does come a minor aspect towards the end that classifies it as an SF film. [PLOT SPOILERS] Here Christian Slater and Olivia d’Abo find the gift that the dying Martin Sheen has left for him – a rock from the Moon. As they uncover it, it emits glowing lights – shades of Cocoon – and is clear evidence of an Alien Artefacts. Quite what it is is never explained, but the ending is left open in terms of hope for Slater to never give up on his goal to go to the stars because ‘something’ is waiting out there.
Trailer here
Full film available here