Every film has its challenges, but no genre is harder to nail than science fiction. That’s because it’s so easy for the final product to look cheap, especially when the setting is outer space. Disney’s latest sci-fi adventure film, Crater, looks anything but cheap. That’s not just because of the 8-figure budget the studio invested in it, but because the time its actors spent preparing to make it look as real as possible too.
During the film’s recent press conference, star Isaiah Russell-Bradley revealed that the entire cast spent nearly two months training in a simulated space environment.
“We did, all together, six weeks of prep to get this spacesuit fittings and the harness stunt training as well,” he said.
He would also later clarify that for four of those weeks, the cast also worked with a company called Legacy to build and learn how to manage customized spacesuits too.
“They made sure they looked like real, functional spacesuits and as realistic as they possibly can look,” he added.
For those last two weeks, he explained that the team worked with stuntman Dave McCumber and team. As Russell-Bradley puts it, “They [helped] us look like real astronauts and perform like real astronauts in low gravity. And they made sure our spacewalk looked as realistic as possible.”
READ: Trailer For Disney+ Original Movie ‘World’s Best’ Released
As fun as the training sounds alone, that surprisingly wasn’t the biggest draw for some of the actors. As actress McKenna Grace put it, “[It was] really cool to be able to do something on the moon, but I think that all of the characters had such a unique bond.”
She added that the film felt really “special” to her. That’s saying a lot considering the actress has done every genre in the book AND even acted in some Academy Award-nominated films.
“I think that this film ends in a way that surprises me,” she said. “And it felt like it had a lot of heart in the script. And I think that it’s quite hard to take a film that is a bunch of kids going on a road trip on the moon and make it feel grounded. It feels real.”
Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, the coming-of-age sci-fi adventure stars Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Mckenna Grace, Billy Barratt, Orson Hong, Thomas Boyce, and Scott Mescudi. A 21 Laps Production, the film was written by John Griffin and produced by Shawn Levy, Dan Levine, and Dan Cohen. The film’s executive producers are Emily Morris, John G. Scotti, Rpin Suwannath, Gordon Gray, Paris Latsis, and Terry Dougas.
Crater is the story of Caleb Channing (Russell-Bailey), who was raised on a lunar mining colony and is about to be permanently relocated to an idyllic faraway planet following the death of his father (Mescudi). But before leaving, to fulfill his dad’s last wish, he and his three best friends, Dylan (Barratt), Borney (Hong) and Marcus (Boyce), and a new arrival from Earth, Addison (Grace), hijack a rover for one final adventure on a journey to explore a mysterious crater.
Crater is available to stream exclusively on Disney+ now.
