Crater is basically Goonies in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar

“They just don’t make ’em like they used to” is a common complaint about movies, TV and everything in between. So many people have a particular fondness for what they saw growing up that the pursuit of nostalgia with endless reboots, remakes, and legacy sequels has become a genre of its own. And new releases that aren’t directly tied to an old, beloved franchise are just as much projects as Stranger thingswhich echoes an entire subgenre of 1980s media and uses that setting as a selling point.

But Disney Plus’ Crater does something that’s pretty rare: it has all the hijinks, the heart, and even the formula of an ’80s kid’s adventure like The Goonies or Stay with me, where a grand escapade fuels a coming-of-age story. But the added complexity of the sci-fi setting allows director Kyle Patrick Alvarez and writer John Griffin to dive into more gripping overarching themes. It is familiar, without being cliché or tied to existing media. At the same time, it’s innovative, in a way that celebrates, rather than snaps at, its well-known genre tropes.

Set in the distant future, Crater is set on a mining colony on the moon. Teen protagonist Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey) has just been orphaned after his father (Scott Mescudi, aka Kid Cudi) is killed in a mining accident. With both parents dead and Caleb too young to work in the mines himself, he has no support of any kind, but a clause in his parents’ contracts says he will be cared for in the paradisiacal world of Omega – a journey where he 75 years in cryosleep and leaving his best friends behind. With the shuttle to Omega leaving in just a few days, Caleb and friends decide to have one last adventure, hijacking a lunar rover to visit a distant crater on the lunar surface – a location that Caleb’s father insisted he would ever see.

The DNA Crater shares with 80s kidventure movies is obvious from the start. The most obvious element is the cast, which ticks off all the expected archetype boxes. Caleb is the main character, but he is more thoughtful and introverted than his best friend Dylan (Billy Barratt), the confident leader of the group. There’s Borney (Orson Hong), the studious worrier who worries about Marcus (Thomas Boyce), the gentle giant who needs special medication because of his oversized heart. (A condition, the characters tell us, that occurs in people who have only lived on the moon.)

Rounding out the group is the designated token girl character, Addison (Mckenna Grace), who has just moved from Earth to the Moon and so is seen as a bit of a spoiled brat and a stick in the mud. But surprise! She proves she’s just as ready for adventure as the group of guys.

All of this can feel like a huge cliché, especially since the kids never subvert their molds. But they capture their archetypes completely and perfectly, bringing nuance and depth to what could be one-note characters. They ultimately base the story, making this moon-based future adventure feel familiar and relatable.

If there’s one thing Alvarez doesn’t quite understand, it’s a smooth transition between flashbacks and the present – the movie opens with an awkward flashback to just a few hours before the present, then flashbacks into that flashback. But with the actors doing such a brilliant job in every scene, it’s easy to forgive the clumsier transitions. Barratt fantastically captures the quintessential Leader of the Pack character, the charming one with the plan who loves his closest friends devotedly and maintains a positive attitude despite his past hardships.

Alvarez integrates heavier sci-fi themes into this well-known coming-of-age adventure story. In this case, it’s not just the idea that Caleb might go into cryosleep and wake up 75 years removed from everything he’s ever known — it’s also the idea that for every glorious and golden spaceport, there are people left behind, shuffling past, and holding on to their unattainable dreams, like the lower class characters in dystopian stories like Elysium, Alita: Battle AngelAnd Snow piercer. The film doesn’t shy away from the realities of life on the moon mining station, and Alvarez seamlessly weaves the ramifications of corrupt futuristic capitalism into the characters themselves. This isn’t a movie where the child stars break into a space station to rescue everyone on the moon; it’s just five kids on one last adventure together. But the setting is so integral to who they are that it also becomes a closer look at the exploitation of workers and how it ripples through generations.

Image: Disney

Coming-of-age stories like Crater often grapple with themes of class and equality, but Crater again does something rare by capturing the issues so common in a specific type of movie and updating them in a seamless and refreshing way – without being cynical about them in a way that modern updates often do. It represents the perfect combination of the two genres and shows how similar they are as they often struggle with idealism versus reality and protagonists facing the unknown. After all, coming-of-age stories are very often about loss – loss of innocence, loss of youth, loss of golden times of yore. Likewise, many reflective sci-fi works look ahead to the possibilities of the future, while also reflecting on what humanity may have lost along the way. Griffin’s script combines the two in such a synergistic way, allowing viewers to really appreciate what makes each genre shine and how well they work when they come together.

Crater is now out on Disney Plus.