‘Molli and Max in the Future’: Adorable couple’s destiny is written in the stars

For all its whiz-bang futuristic trappings — the sentient robots and the Fish People and the flying cars and the parallel dimensions and the “Blade Runner” cities, all of it — writer-director Michael Lukk Litwak’s clever and sweet and funny “Molli and Max in the Future” comes down to this: It’s “When Harry Met Sally …” in outer space.

With Zosia Mamet (“Girls”) and Aristotle Athari (“Saturday Night Live”) deftly playing off each other as the likable albeit messed-up leads, this is the classic “Will They, or Won’t They?” formula, set against a green-screen backdrop and some VFX and props that probably cost about as much as the catering budget for a MCU movie. Well. Not that much. The cheesy visuals that look like they were lifted from the Dawn of the Music Video and the props that could have been borrowed from “Saturday Night Live” only add to the campy enjoyment.

When Mamet’s Molli and Athari’s Max have a Meet Cute (actually, it’s a Crash Cute) in outer space, they’re both filled with ambition. Molli is a hopeless romantic looking to get into space magic, while Max is a nerdy tech-bro inventor who dreams of building the ultimate robot so he can become a “Mega Mech Fight” superstar. (Max is also half-human, half-fish. That’s a thing in this universe.)

After some initial bickering, Molli and Max quickly become best friends — but just when it seems they might take things to the romantic level, their lives take them on separate paths. Over the next 12 years, Molli and Max will be apart for long stretches of time, but fate always seems to bring them back to each other. (Hey, kinda like “Past Lives!”)

As Max and Molli deal with very real problems such as falling for the wrong person, feeling lost and insecure, wondering if there’s anyone they can trust, writer-director Litwak has them traveling through a very complex and dense and weird universe.

At one point, Molli becomes a “Level Seven Space Witch” and leads an intergalactic war for the omniscient deity Moebius (Okieriete Onaodowan), who has tentacles and a giant head, and turns out to be the leader of a sex cult. As for Max, he indeed becomes a famous warrior as well as a spokesperson-fish-man for Glorp Cola, and he takes up with an AI girlfriend (a terrific Erin Drake) who for some reason talks as if she’s in a 1930s screwball comedy.

We also get some heavy-handed and often distracting metaphors about today’s world, with Michael Chernus playing a political candidate named Turboschmuck who is an obvious and grossly exaggerated take on Donald Trump.

The subplot detours test our patience but also remind us of how much we’re enjoying the main storyline and the wonderful chemistry between Mamet and Athari, and we’re always happy to return to their lives and see what metaphysical madness they’re experiencing. “Molli and Max” are in the future, but their story is rooted firmly in the rom-com past.