During a routine scroll through Hulu’s Newly Added Movies feed, surrounded by Treasure Planet, 28 Weeks Later, and other typical licensed library additions, I spotted a film I had genuinely never heard of before. This is a rare case for me: I would never claim to have seen every new movie that winds up on streaming, but based on the 27,000 emails I get every day promoting upcoming releases, I have basically heard about everything. Yet Long Distance, a polished sci-fi survival thriller starring Anthony Ramos (Hamilton, Ironheart), was completely off my radar.
But there’s a twist: I did hear about this movie — more than five years ago, when it had a different title. One might assume based on being shelved for half a decade before being unceremoniously dumped to streaming that Long Distance is a colossal failure that Universal Pictures, the distributor early on, couldn’t cut into releasable trash. Not the case. It’s totally charming! And sporadically high-tension! What happened here?
Long Distance was originally Distant, and it was shot way back at the end of 2020, as Hollywood productions revved back up under intense COVID-19 protocols. Long Distance’s premise is the same as the original pitch Steven Spielberg’s studio Amblin Entertainment announced at the start of production: Ramos stars as Andy, an asteroid miner who, mid-cryo sleep, crash-lands on a planet and must traverse the alien terrain to rescue the ship’s only other survivor, who is trapped in an escape pod. The script was clearly written pre-pandemic — Ramos was cast all the way back in December 2019 — but the finished film is a time capsule of era, with Ramos spending a good portion of the film by his lonesome, as if he was in a sci-fi take on Cast Away. Perfect for the social distancing era.
Image: Hulu
I knew about Distant because for years, Universal Pictures, which was set to distribute the film, kept it planted on the release calendar. First it was slated for March 2022. Then September 2022. Then January 2023. After a fourth move, to Jan. 19, 2024, the movie disappeared from the calendar altogether. Directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon, who previously made Blades of Glory and Office Christmas Party, were all set to make a big pivot to space-age spectacle whenever Distant finally came out. They didn’t wait around: As the movie sat in limbo, the duo went off and made Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (underrated).
Distant was eventually retitled Long Distance and given a small release in Vietnam in 2024. Then it hit Hulu last week in the blur of the July 4 holiday weekend. I received exactly zero emails from any studio to explain that this was happening. Considering that Rotten Tomatoes still has a page for Distant, it’s possible no one got the memo.
What’s true is that Speck and Gordon’s 86-minute romantically tinged thriller is caught between two modes, which makes it a challenge to market in the modern movie landscape: It’s not quite grand and propulsive enough to fill IMAX theaters like a marketable Gravity successor, nor was it made cheaply enough — judging by the spiffy special effects and practical production design — to sentence it to a straight-to-streaming release. There’s probably more to the story than pure cost (although little has been reported on the topic in the years since its production), but Long Distance is a rare case of a bumpy behind-the-scenes journey not speaking to a project’s actual quality. Speck and Gordon made a fun little Big Movie.
Image: Hulu
Long Distance doesn’t have the most original story concept. Andy’s early hurdles — escaping his own pod, sealing a puncture in his space suit, locating the crashed starship Borealis in hopes of finding help — recalls The Martian, Buried (the “Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin” movie), and the shark-survival staple The Shallows. At times, it even plays like the Tom Hardy one-man-show Locke, with Ramos’ Andy chitchatting with trapped fellow traveller Naomi (Smile 2’s Naomi Scott) over comms, and his pedantic AI helper LEONARD (Star Trek’s Zachary Quinto) who is quick to reprimand him for abusing company equipment, even though he’s just trying to survive. The already frightening scenario of Andy finding an oxygen-rich refuge where he can live out the next few years waiting for rescue is complicated by the fact that the planet is also home to some flesh-munching arachnid beasties. Throwing a dash of Alien into a space-refugee story might be derivative, but it’s a welcome escalation.
The whole thing might feel like a mishmashed rehash of better movies, if not for Ramos’ anchor performance, Scott showing up later on to make it a full-blown flirty two-hander (attached at the hip by oxygen tube!), and a few dazzling set pieces. Even on my TV, the initial downing of the Borealis by an asteroid belt was rendered with destructive grandeur. The action scales down when Andy makes his way through grey, misty surroundings, but Speck and Gordon keep banging the drum of the nightmare situation: Even if our hero can survive the day, there’s no telling how he’ll survive the wait — or why he’d want to.
The only reason Andy signed up to mine asteroids light years away from home is because of [redacted trauma spoiler]. His memories of the past are constantly at odds with the immediate terror of the moment, and while Long Distance isn’t exactly Solaris, Ramos’ Tom Hanks-esque everyman persona adds weight to the situation. The worker-for-hire is not an Andy Weir know-it-all, and his place on the corporate hierarchy threatens his life even after the crash: Partway through the movie, he discovers Naomi has a manager-level suit that patches its own holes, while his lowly miner suit leaves him completely expendable. This is the private company he’s hoping will send a rescue mission.
Long Distance has brains, brawn, and a sappy sentimental side. I was shocked that, after sitting on the shelf for years, Speck and Gordon’s movie was watchable — and recommendable. And in this day and age, a half-decent sci-fi movie plopped on streaming needs the boost. Like Andy, stranded on a distant world after a seismic crash and burn, Long Distance is lost in a galaxy of #content. Consider this a homing beacon.
Long Distance is currently streaming on Hulu.
