BEFORE: Well, after all the back and forth and hemming and hawing, and internal debate over whether to add this film or subtract that one, and after watching "First Man" and "Apollo 11" essentially a month early, look what happened. A film about rocketry ended up on the date that's the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. This was not intentional - this film was long planned to be my return to fiction after Documentary Month, even when I had the WRONG lead-in for it, a film that didn't connect to it at all. After fixing the lead-out, this happens, another huge coincidence. Sure, it would have been better for a film about Apollo 11 to land here, but as I said before, I wanted to get out ahead of the curve - I watched those films early and still I'm sort of on the same subject today. Sort of.
I've also been calling this weekend "Stay at Home Comic-Con" weekend, a jokey term I'm borrowing from my BFF Andy, who coined it. Things are happening in San Diego, announcements are being made, "Star Wars" actors are signing autographs (probably) and I'm not there. It still feels weird, because I used to organize my whole summer around that trip, I had a pattern of restaurants that I liked to check in with, I had a nice little routine going for 15 years, and the ride's over. I didn't work at a Comic-Con at all last year, but I will work at NY Comic-Con this October. So the stress dreams will be back before long - it just wasn't profitable for my company to keep making the trek to California, so now I'm at home, watching parts of it on TV and just relaxing this weekend, it's too hot to even go outside.
So, lots of geek-related activities planned, I suppose I kicked it off with that film about Steve Jobs, and now I'm on rocketry, and two more geek-centric movies will round out the weekend. Again, not planned, but I do watch so much geeky stuff that this isn't much of a coincidence, really. I finished watching both "Good Omens" and "Stranger Things" Season 3 this week, for example. Now I should probably move on to "Legion" or something similar.
Laura Dern carries over from "Trespassing Bergman".
THE PLOT: The true story of Homer Hickham, a coal miner's son who was inspired by the first Sputnik launch to take up rocketry, against his father's wishes.
AFTER: Rocketry was still a very geeky thing when I was growing up - like I didn't launch rockets in my backyard, but I think I knew people who did. There were kits that people could order from catalogs, and teen boys spent a lot of time building them and launching them. But why? We had giant rockets that took astronauts into orbit or to the moon, what possible purpose could the little ones serve, ones that only go up a few hundred feet before falling back to earth? I just didn't get it. It's like when you play with Matchbox cars because you're not old enough to own the real thing, I guess, but to me the little ones are always going to pale by comparison to the big ones. Maybe some things never really go out of style, like people still ride horses even though we have cars, and some people still pay their bills by check even though we have electronic banking.
But it's important to remember that this film is set in October 1957, when the U.S. didn't HAVE the big rockets, at least not as far as the populace in West Virginia knew - so four high-schoolers setting off rockets out in the middle of nowhere might have been a really big deal. NASA wasn't even established until 1958 - so also, a Russian satellite passing over the U.S. was also a really big deal. What was Sputnik doing? Was it spying on Americans? Transmitting secret codes to Soviet operatives? If only a bunch of misfits teens could set off their own rockets, though honestly I fail to see how that's going to compete with Sputnik - really, the line between here and there seems very ill-defined. The best they're going to be able to do is make rockets that don't expode on ignition, and even then, they're going to go up in an arc and then come back down. Big whoop, if I'm being honest.
I realize that I'm blasé about the whole thing because I stand on the shoulders of giants, but I took physics in high school just to fulfill the science requirement, I wasn't genuinely all that interested in it. By then I'd set my sights on somehow getting into movie-making and didn't really see the need to keep up with science. But I took an astronomy course at NYU, which fulfilled a math requirement for my diploma - I finally learned the names of most of the constellations and learned the formulas necessary to observe how the sun and moon appear to travel through the sky. That's about as far as I got in the world of aeronautics, except for visiting the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum as a kid and the Johnson Space Center in Houston last year. And the three best things about going to the Johnson Center were getting to see the Apollo 11 Mission Control, getting a peek at the Orion capsule that may take humans to Mars someday, and having a BBQ chicken sandwich in the visitors' cafeteria. But these were my preferences, your mileage may vary.
Rockets this small are kind of like fireworks - I was enamored of them when I was a kid, but I grew out of it. Fireworks don't really impress me much, unless they make cool shapes when they explode, otherwise, it's the same old shit - I fast-forwarded through the Macy's Fireworks on July 4 just to see what music cues they were using, and honestly, that seemed like the same playlist as last year. How about keeping it current? But then, if they did, I'd probably complain about how the music was geared toward the kids and not old fogeys like me. Same deal for rocketry and space exploration - we're going to go back to the moon? Ho hum, we've done that already. Oh, wait, we're going to Mars? That seems a bit too extreme, it's too far, I can't comprehend it. I'm just never going to be satisfied, it seems, so let me withdraw from the conversation.
Like, they're running "Apollo 11" again tonight on CNN, and my first thought is, "Oh great, another rerun..." I'm a terrible person.
I do like anagrams, though - so a movie titled "October Sky" that's based on a book titled "Rocket Boys", I find that somewhat interesting, but really, that's a limited appeal aimed at a niche market. What does that say about me, that I think that's more fascinating than the story itself?
NITPICK POINT #1: As a tangent to my point above, about why do people still ride horses and launch tiny rockets - why are we still freakin' using COAL? Admittedly, if Homer Hickham had created a coal-based rocket, which I think was a natural fit considering where he grew up, that could have made things a lot more interesting. But he didn't, did he? Because rockets need liquid or gas fuel, because that's so much more efficient. And now we have natural gas, hydro-power, wind and solar - as Al Gore mansplained, there's enough solar energy hitting the Earth every HOUR to give humans all the power we need for a YEAR. So again, why continue mining coal? It's not "clean", no matter what the President says, and any city or town that's built its economy around a coal mine is doomed to fail, sooner or later. It's a good idea to change horses before the one you're on drops dead, not after.
NITPICK POINT #2: I can see why someone stole the rocket nozzle from Homer's science fair project, because clearly someone wanted to prevent him from winning, but who would steal his autographed photo of Werner Von Braun. Who else would even want that? George Carlin used to joke that when some people misplace things, they automatically assume that somebody stole them - "Hey, who stole my collection of used Band-Aids?" So isn't it more likely that Homer just lost this somehow?
NITPICK POINT #3: It's a little odd that the miners would go on strike after the mining company declared that the mine was running out of coal. This seems like an unrealistic depiction of actual events, because if there was a chance that the mine would be shutting down soon, that would be the WORST time for the miners to strike. Realistically, this could cause the mining company to just shut it down a little earlier as planned, so logically this plot point doesn't really work, except that it creates the necessary dramatic tension to make it a big deal when Homer's father settles the strike, just to help him out with his science project. And if the town was really behind Homer as claimed, what would be so wrong with someone using the machine shop during the strike, just to create a new nozzle? It's not like that would be the equivalent of crossing the picket line, and the striking miners wouldn't even have to know about it, so it seems like an extreme solution to a simple problem.
NITPICK POINT #4: They tried to pull a Kubrick-like "2001" transition at the end, by cutting between the Rocket Boys' final launch and the modern space shuttle. But I'm just not sold on the implication, that there's a direct line from one to the other. The U.S. space program consisted of many people, many projects, and I think implying that we might not have gotten where we are without a few boys in West Virginia setting off rockets feels like a grave injustice. Or at least a giant over-simplification - but this movie seems to be full of them. (Homer can study rocket science or work in the mines - there are simply no other alternatives, it seems.)
Also starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Proof"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "Breach"), Chris Owen (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), William Lee Scott (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Chad Lindberg (last seen in "City of Angels"), Natalie Canerday (last seen in "Biloxi Blues"), Chris Ellis (last seen in "Love Liza"), Elya Baskin (last seen in "Angels & Demons"), Scott Thomas, David Dwyer (last seen in "A Simple Twist of Fate"), Courtney Cole-Fendley, Terry Loughlin, Kalli Hollister, Mark Jeffrey Miller, David Copeland, Joey DiGaetano, Andy Stahl.
RATING: 4 out of 10 railroad spikes
No comments:
Post a Comment