BEFORE: I know, it's Mother's Day, but how should I commemorate it? By watching "Sophie's Choice" or "Terms of Endearment"? I already have other plans for those films. Plus I'm sort of locked into my astronaut chain, and I don't want to break that up. Look, if I'm still doing this next Mother's Day, I promise to watch "Baby Mama" and/or "Knocked Up".
Turner Classic Movies ran this last year to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing - so I'm marking that too, I'm just a bit behind. Or maybe the 50th Anniversary of the first official Mercury flight in 1960 - yeah, that'll work...
THE PLOT: The original US Mercury 7 astronauts and their macho, seat-of-the-pants approach to the space program.
AFTER: What was that I was saying about 3-hour long films? This one actually deserved to be that long, it covered a lot of ground. I started this film just before midnight and ended up staying up WAY too late - but I didn't feel tired, the film was that exhilarating!
And it's sort of broken down into three hour-(or so)long segments - the race to break the sound barrier, the recruitment and training of the Mercury astronauts, and then the initial manned forays into outer space. This was all fascinating stuff to me - I never went through an "astronaut" phase when I was a kid, and I've never really taken the time to learn the difference between the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. So this is a "crash" course (forgive the pun...) in the lives of the Mercury 7.
Initially, the film's focus is on Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), the first man to break the sound barrier in an airplane - I suppose it would have been too confusing if Sam Shepard had played Alan Shepard instead of Yeager... Shepard flew out of Edwards Air Force Base in California, which then attracted a generation of hotshot pilots once the word got out, including Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid).
What you really get a sense of is the camaraderie, but also the spirit of competition, which is by nature the spirit of America. Anything you can do, I can do better, and faster, and with more style... But every time someone sets a new speed record, Yeager is there to break it, and earn the nickname "The Fastest Man Alive".
After the USSR launches Sputnik, setting off the "Space Race", recruiters come to Edwards Air Force Base looking for their first U.S. astronauts, and they find Grissom, Cooper and Deke Slayton. Also recruited were John Glenn (Ed Harris) from the Marines, and Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra (Lance Henriksen) from the Navy. Now they had men from different branches of the military competing against each other, so you know they'll each want to try and outshine the others.
I thought the film did a great job of showing the different personalities of the astronauts, they weren't (all) just cookie-cutter alpha-macho horndog types. And then when they united against a common foe, be it the rocket designers, the USSR, or the use of chimps as test subjects, they were a force to be reckoned with.
And the film explores the hardships of the astronauts' wives as well - who had to deal with the very real possibility of their husbands not surviving a test launch, or dealing with the aggressive media if their husbands lived, and succeeded on a mission.
I didn't really get the digression with the Australian aborigines and the lights floating around Glenn's capsule - but there were a thousand other little details that I was thrilled to learn about. I also didn't see the point of returning to Chuck Yeager again so late in the film - I guess it was to contrast his career with Glenn's, since Yeager turned down a chance to train as an astronaut.
Also starring Barbara Hershey, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Kathy Baker, David Clennon, with Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer (!) as the NASA recruiters. And a cameo by Chuck Yeager himself, as the bartender at Pancho's!
RATING: 7 out of 10 explosive bolts
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