The Right Stuff

Overall, it's a good movie about the start of the space race. The space race was one of the aspects that marked the intense rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. There was the notion that space could be a battleground or a zone of influence, as colonial territories had been decades before, and that the nuclear threat made it urgent to dominate space. That's why the Mercury Program was born, responsible for the first suborbital and orbital flights carried out by the USA. Directed by Philip Kaufman, the film is very good and very well made, even if, at times, it resembles an expensive advertisement for NASA and what was done by the North Americans in the space race. It is a long film, with three hours, but that is justified by covering a large period of time and giving us a very global view of the Mercury missions. This leads me to another problem: you need to have a minimal knowledge of the program and who was part of it to be able to understand everything the film shows, because there are not many explanations and the film presumes that the audience knows what they are watching. The cast is, perhaps, one of the most important aspects of the film, since it is largely based on the development of the characters and on the way each actor worked and developed his character. And there is no doubt that we have a wide range of talented artists here where Sam Shepard, Fred Ward, Ed Harris and Dennis Quaid dominate the canvas and capture our full attention. There's no way to single out just one or two, I think each of them did the best they could with what they had at hand, and director Kaufman got the best out of them all. It's a very light film, not a dense drama full of technical aspects or complicated ideas. The film even manages to give us an idea of the political and financial management of the project, and the use that American politicians were making of it for electoral purposes. There's some room for humor, but it's not a movie that makes us laugh out loud. The most comical situation for me was the way in which an American vice president was stopped at the door of an astronaut's house by his wife. The dialogues are good, they are well written, and the visual and special effects used are convincing. This film also has good cinematography and a very atmospheric soundtrack.

As propaganda films go this one checks all the boxes. Let's go over a few of them. We've got some white male americans boasting about being the best at one thing or another. We've historical figures being portrayed as one dimensional caricatures. We've got some pretend germans with pretend fake german accents doing some pretend science. We've got some rewriting of history in favor of bad skits with attempted humour. We've got Dennis Quaid doing his best Jack Nicholson smirk impression. We even got a badly dubbed Giant Gonzales (that's not a racial joke on my part, there's an actual giant named Gonzales in the movie with an english voiceover) just to get a shameful joke in. We've got all of that packaged in just 190 minutes that just fly by. If this bill of goods was cut by about an hour and sold to us as a straight up comedy instead of something that's supposed to be halfway accurate we'd actually have something decent here. As it stands, this "historical drama" gets a well deserved whole 1 point out of 10.