This initially intriguing effort ultimately winds up as a light-weight space yarn not worthy of its acting talent. Promising in its truly impressive guy-movie ensemble cast consisting of nothing less than Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland (I mean, really, who makes movies like that anymore), it really needed a script overhaul before shooting and if nothing else shows that if Eastwood is looking for any more empty chairs, he need look no farther than than his own in terms of judging this ready to go the way it was written. The story is emotionally off-balance and thus ultimately unsatisfying in the end. Seeming to start out as the story of older men trying to prove to themselves that they aren't finished being young yet, it never really develops that theme fully or even effectively before changing directions and becoming just another comparatively weak, explosion-based, conspiracy-oriented space-opera techno-drama devoid of serious dramatic content. What began looking like a worthy sequel, perhaps, to the vastly better 1983 movie THE RIGHT STUFF, quickly descends to the level of tepid fluff. The lost youth angle retreats from being a major theme to the degraded status of a mere gimmick, just an excuse for a geriatric Clint Eastwood to play a tough-guy astronaut at this advanced stage of his real life.
And once it reaches that point, it grows weaker still. The typical expository dialogue necessary to convey the action clearly is all but absent, distracting the viewer from whatever the movie might be accomplishing otherwise while he is kept busy trying to figure out what is going on with the plot. And considering that the film takes place in contemporary times with all the familiar trappings of the then-current state of the American space program (it is NOT science fiction), the script indulges in ever more silly lapses of verisimilitude (and without any attempt to rationalize its overreaching) to the point it winds up looking as dumb as the episode of the hackneyed *Walker, Texas Ranger* episode where the audience is supposed to believe non-pilot Chuck Norris could make a successful emergency landing of a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet airliner after taking a grand total of about two flying lessons in a Cessna 172. One's willing suspension of disbelief is long gone by the film's climax when characters are performing amazing feats of derring-do which practically nothing in the previous two hours has prepared the audience to believe that they might ever conceivably be able to do. Finally, the ultimate conclusion of the film is just a collection of loose ends, punctuated at the finale by an emphatically tacky (if not positively juvenile) shot that trespasses over the line of sentimentality into just plain bad taste.
I began writing this with a vague sense that it suffered from inadequate writing but as I continue thinking about it while writing this I simply can't help but wonder whatever the hell happened to the talents of professional screenwriters in the late modern period who can't seem to grasp basic story-telling elements that were the norm in movies not only great but also often very small prior to the final conquest of the world by the baby boom generation. It's difficult to believe that these guys could have passed writing 102, much less sold this interim draft for enough money to live on well for at least a year. In the final analysis, the only thing I really wound up liking this movie for was the opportunity to see classic screen personalities like Tommy Lee Jones, and especially Sutherland and Garner (badly underutilized as the latter is in this movie), and all together at that, as well as a repeat of RIGHT STUFF visual effects and some admittedly pretty decent dialogue in some places; an added bonus was the scene shot in (and in the parking lot of) the late Outpost Tavern near the Johnson Space Center in the Houston area of Texas, a popular hang-out with astronauts and other NASA personnel before it closed forever in 2009/2010. I still miss it personally.
P.S. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how you will find long authoritative-sounding reviews on IMDb where the reviewer expounds with the air of the Dean of a film school and yet he gets basic facts of what happened in the movie just plain dead wrong. In this movie, James Cromwell's character was NOT a project director who canceled Project Daedalus and thus sacked Clint Eastwood in 1958. "Project Daedalus" in the movie was a fictional stand-in for the United State's REAL plans, under development in the 1950's, to eventually put Americans into space with some sort of space plane operated by the United States Air Force. However, that plan was ultimately canceled in favor of the rocket-and-space-capsule approach done by the civilian agency NASA in response to the unexpectedly sudden spectacular developments of the Soviet (Russian) space program in that time frame. The movie explicitly recognizes this historical fact (in a rare bit of exposition that actually does appear in this movie), and in fact Cromwell, who is but a lower-level military officer something like 470 layers down the organizational chart from the Oval Office at the White House where that decision was actually made, is merely the last and least guy in a string of messengers bearing the bad news to Eastwood's team. Additionally, the incorporation of the chimpanzee was merely a heavily oversimplified dramatic flourish that reflects that with NASA taking over manned space flight from the air force, the first advanced life form they sent into space was a chimp named HAM (and not, "Marianne"), something that was dramatized to vastly better effect in THE RIGHT STUFF, which was also vastly better written.
And once it reaches that point, it grows weaker still. The typical expository dialogue necessary to convey the action clearly is all but absent, distracting the viewer from whatever the movie might be accomplishing otherwise while he is kept busy trying to figure out what is going on with the plot. And considering that the film takes place in contemporary times with all the familiar trappings of the then-current state of the American space program (it is NOT science fiction), the script indulges in ever more silly lapses of verisimilitude (and without any attempt to rationalize its overreaching) to the point it winds up looking as dumb as the episode of the hackneyed *Walker, Texas Ranger* episode where the audience is supposed to believe non-pilot Chuck Norris could make a successful emergency landing of a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet airliner after taking a grand total of about two flying lessons in a Cessna 172. One's willing suspension of disbelief is long gone by the film's climax when characters are performing amazing feats of derring-do which practically nothing in the previous two hours has prepared the audience to believe that they might ever conceivably be able to do. Finally, the ultimate conclusion of the film is just a collection of loose ends, punctuated at the finale by an emphatically tacky (if not positively juvenile) shot that trespasses over the line of sentimentality into just plain bad taste.
I began writing this with a vague sense that it suffered from inadequate writing but as I continue thinking about it while writing this I simply can't help but wonder whatever the hell happened to the talents of professional screenwriters in the late modern period who can't seem to grasp basic story-telling elements that were the norm in movies not only great but also often very small prior to the final conquest of the world by the baby boom generation. It's difficult to believe that these guys could have passed writing 102, much less sold this interim draft for enough money to live on well for at least a year. In the final analysis, the only thing I really wound up liking this movie for was the opportunity to see classic screen personalities like Tommy Lee Jones, and especially Sutherland and Garner (badly underutilized as the latter is in this movie), and all together at that, as well as a repeat of RIGHT STUFF visual effects and some admittedly pretty decent dialogue in some places; an added bonus was the scene shot in (and in the parking lot of) the late Outpost Tavern near the Johnson Space Center in the Houston area of Texas, a popular hang-out with astronauts and other NASA personnel before it closed forever in 2009/2010. I still miss it personally.
P.S. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how you will find long authoritative-sounding reviews on IMDb where the reviewer expounds with the air of the Dean of a film school and yet he gets basic facts of what happened in the movie just plain dead wrong. In this movie, James Cromwell's character was NOT a project director who canceled Project Daedalus and thus sacked Clint Eastwood in 1958. "Project Daedalus" in the movie was a fictional stand-in for the United State's REAL plans, under development in the 1950's, to eventually put Americans into space with some sort of space plane operated by the United States Air Force. However, that plan was ultimately canceled in favor of the rocket-and-space-capsule approach done by the civilian agency NASA in response to the unexpectedly sudden spectacular developments of the Soviet (Russian) space program in that time frame. The movie explicitly recognizes this historical fact (in a rare bit of exposition that actually does appear in this movie), and in fact Cromwell, who is but a lower-level military officer something like 470 layers down the organizational chart from the Oval Office at the White House where that decision was actually made, is merely the last and least guy in a string of messengers bearing the bad news to Eastwood's team. Additionally, the incorporation of the chimpanzee was merely a heavily oversimplified dramatic flourish that reflects that with NASA taking over manned space flight from the air force, the first advanced life form they sent into space was a chimp named HAM (and not, "Marianne"), something that was dramatized to vastly better effect in THE RIGHT STUFF, which was also vastly better written.