Nice execution of uplifting family movie.

Rating: 5/10 (3 November 2006)

Sometimes I find myself getting them mixed up -- Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Penny Marshall. Even Spielberg's heartwarming kiddie movies. They're often enjoyable viewing and they're suitable for children of all ages. Early conflicts between two people of honor are resolved. There's often a patriotic theme. Very few cuss words. The musical score tells us emphatically that this is a moving experience. Maybe not the Second Coming exactly but a dangerous trip to the moon or a damned good baseball game. And don't worry. Our side wins.
This one is about a failed trip to the moon. The "failed" part of it is gotten past pretty quickly and the emphasis shifts immediately to a different challenge -- can we get the crippled craft and its stressed-out crew back to the earth in one piece? The answer of course is yes, so it turns the movie into a story of triumph instead of tragedy.
I don't mean to apply too energetic a hammer to the real events or the real characters. It's pretty spooky stuff, being up there, looking at the earth when it's no bigger than a street lamp. The rest of us who tremble when we have to climb a ladder higher than the first-floor windows can only marvel.
And the story itself, no matter well or poorly told, has enough suspense and awe intrinsic to it that we can't help being drawn into it.
What's bothersome is the slick commercialism that seems to provide the craft and its story with its real source of power. You know ahead of time that we'll spend time with the anguished wife at home, that we'll see one endangered astronaut sharing pictures of his lovely family with the others. The reporters will becoming a nagging, intrusive nuisance. The wife will be given a line like, "If this moon landing wasn't good enough for the press, why has it become news now that it won't land?" There are a multitude of technical problem that arise when the side of the craft pops and deconstructs, and they're rushed through as if the audience doesn't really care about the challenges or how they're met. Or -- maybe not that the viewers don't care. Maybe they're too dumb to understand. The technical glitches and maneuvers seem to present challenges to the film makers as well -- how quickly can we get rid of the uninteresting metallic junk and get back to the suffering of the crew, the ground support, and the families? It succeeds extremely well in doing what it intends to do, but what it intends to do makes few demands on the maturity of viewers. It's like a very complicated jigsaw puzzle and after you put it all together you have a picture of three dogs in vests playing cards.
You know what could be gripping? The real story of the Challenger disaster of 1986. With an emphasis on the groupspeak of Raytheon, Mission Control, and NASA. Maybe the hero could be Richard Feynman. You should have seen him cut through the blizzard of technocrap thrown up by the engineers and bureaucrats playing CYA at the hearings. Here they are, explaining what happened by evoking "ambient temperature values" and "minimalizing coefficients." And Feynman asks politely, "You mean when it gets cold the rubber shrinks?" And he demonstrates by dunking a piece of rubber in a glass of ice water. Doesn't that have more cinematic potential than this movie's Ed Harris shouting, "Failure is not an option"?
However, the kids should enjoy this, and it's worth watching for everyone, if only because it is based on a true story. Its heartwarming qualities aside, everyone involved in an enterprise like this -- successful or not -- should be applauded. And whatever they're being paid, it's not enough.