As Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark prepare themselves to fulfil many a little boys dream and become real life astronauts on rocket-ship New Shepard, here’s a look at space flight in the movies.
No doubt part of the fun for Jeff will be tweaking the noses of fellow space rival billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Unless one or both of the pesky duo steal a march on the Brothers Bezos before July 20th that is. I have tried to avoid the obvious choices: Gravity, Interstellar, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Passengers and Apollo 13 – all worthy of a watch – and introduce you to lesser known titles.
Understandably, the rigours of space flight are rarely the subject for full blown comedy movies (although there are numerous TV series that do), but older pictures such as Dark Star (1974), Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) and Galaxy Quest (1999) continue to deliver on the laughter front.
I have included one comedy-drama movie of (relatively) recent vintage to demonstrate the range available.
Life (2017) Amazon Prime, Rent/Buy
Alien-lite sci-fi horror Life isn’t a bad movie as such, just not a particularly original one, wasting a fine cast that includes Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson as scientists on an international space station in the near future.
Although featured prominently on the film’s posters, Ryan Reynolds role is more of a glorified cameo than a third lead, a regular habit for the actor if you remember his appearances in Fast Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw (2019) and Criminal (2016). Life includes yet another scene where a (ostensibly intelligent) character sticks part of their body into obviously threatening alien gloop (see also The Thing, Annihilation, The Color of Space, Alien, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and all the other Aliens).
Hidden Figures (2016) Amazon Rent/Buy
A genuinely inspiring biographical film based on a true story of the female African American mathematicians who worked for NASA during the early decades of the Space Race.
The women face both institutional and petty personal racism at NASA, but their collective brain power proves invaluable to the programme, their dignity in adversity winning both the respect of Space Task Force Head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) and the initial enmity of head engineer Stafford (Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons).
An old-fashioned, hopeful picture – and none the worse for that, Hidden Figures stars Taraji P. Henson as the real-life NASA mathematician Katherine Goble Johnson, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe play her fellow mathematicians/engineers Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.
The Martian (2015) Amazon Rent/Buy
Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a soulful counterpart to the likes of his chillier Alien movies, and in some ways all the better for it. When disco-hating botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is mistakenly left for dead by his fellow Mars Ares III crew members, he must both survive and find a way of returning home. Which of course he does, aided by his ingenuity and a very healthy appetite for the humble potato
Scott assembled a top notch cast around Damon, including Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Sean Bean, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Donald Glover and Aksel Hennie.
Sunshine (2007) Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy
Danny Boyle’s sci-fi flick Sunshine looks fantastic, is well cast, and has a concept (a bomb-laden spaceship kickstarting our dying sun to save the world) that is similar to Christopher Nolan’s later Interstellar (2014), with additional elements of Paul W. S. Anderson unsettling space-chiller Event Horizon.
But…as with most Danny Boyle pictures, Sunshine is weighed down by his artistic pretensions, poor pacing, and continual striving for significance.
So, if you regard the movie as dry run for the aforementioned Interstellar, you will probably find something to enjoy, along with performances of an impressive acting company that includes Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong (again) and the now obligatory Mark Strong, an actor who appears to turn up in every other motion picture produced over the last 15 years or so.
Space Cowboys (2000) Amazon Rent/Buy
With the exception of his two movies with Clyde the orangutan (Every Which Way but Loose, 1978 and Any Which Way You Can, 1980), Clint Eastwood usually confines his limited talent for comedy to the odd sardonic remark or a raised eyebrow.
With Space Cowboys, Eastwood combined humour with drama in a yarn about over-the-hill former astronauts recruited to prevent an oldSoviet-era communications satellite from crashing to Earth. Clint (as Colonel Frank Corvin) heads up a team of old-timers numbering screen veterans Donald Sutherland, James Garner, and comparative youngster Tommy Lee Jones. When the team discover that the ‘communications’ satellite is in fact loaded with nuclear weapons, their task takes on additional urgency.
As long as you don’t expect too much, Space Cowboys passes the time amiably, as the chemistry between the quartet of oldsters works pretty well. James Cromwell stars as baddish guy NASA project manager Bob Gerson: he played a more heroic role as warp drive inventor Zefram Cochrane in 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact.
Mission to Mars/Red Planet (2000) Amazon Rent/Buy
Two Mars-themed motion pictures were released in 2000; neither was a box office success, but both have their merits. Set in 2020, Brian De Palma’s stately Mission to Mars has some poignant and nail-biting moments, together with a plangent Ennio Morricone score, but is let down by the weeping poorly rendered CGI aliens of the picture’s finale.
Red Planet is a more traditional movie, with the crew of the 2056 Mars-1 mission stalked by dysfunctional military robot AMEE (Autonomous Mapping Exploration and Evasion) on the planet’s arid surface. In an obvious nod to 2001’s astronaut Dave Bowman, Carrie Ann Moss’ character is named Kate Bowman.
Both films have eco-themes and feature the now ubiquitous semi-destruction sequence of spaceships in orbit above a planet (see also The Martian, Life etc).
Contact (1997) Amazon Rent/Buy
Robert Zemeckis’ (Forrest Gump) adaptation of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact posits a non-traditional mode of space travel. When the SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) programme picks up images of the 1936 Berlin Olympics embedded in a signal from the distant Vega system, Earth’s scientists and political leaders have to figure out the best way to respond.
When eventually plans for an advanced machine are also sent by the Vegans, two options appear to the world’s panjandrums: either it’s a novel form of interplanetary exploration or a world-destroying device sent from Vega to obliterate newly emerging intelligences capable of radio contact. Contact is a rather serious affair with plenty of ethical, scientific, and moral conundrums, but is quite absorbing – if you are in the mood for a dialogue-heavy drama, that is. And no big alien reveal.
The picture boasts a strong cast that includes Jodie Foster, an elaborately coiffured Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, James Woods, and Angela Bassett.
Capricorn One (1978) available free on YouTube via Flick Vault, Pluto TV, Amazon Buy
My favourite of Lew Grade’s starry attempts to break into the movie business, Capricorn One riffs with the ‘fake moon landings’ theory (except this time Mars) adding a soupçon of Planet of the Apes’ chase sequences and Westworld’s (1973) fakery, aided by the presence from the latter of James Brolin (aka Mr B Streisand).
The crew of Capricorn One, the first manned flight to Mars, is pulled from the cabin at the last minute and ‘persuaded’ to take part in a studio-set counterfeit landing.
Head honcho Dr. James Kelloway (the late Hal Halbrook) explains that the life support in the craft was malfunctioning and that they would have been dead within minutes…also (more importantly) resulting in a loss of funding. When nosey journalist Caulfield (Elliott Gould) realises that there is something fishy going on, it’s a race against time to save the astronauts and reveal the truth.
As part of his two-picture deal with Grade, Telly (Kojak) Savalas pops up as an unhinged crop-duster pilot who helps Gould find the surviving crew member.
Planet of the Apes (1968) Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy
Lest we forget, the original Apes movie begins with the landfall (or lake fall in this case) of the space craft Liberty 1, nicknamed Icarus.
A long journey in hibernation through what the crew assume is hyper-space is rudely awakened by an inrush of water and the discovery that Stewart, the only female member has perished due to her faulty sleep chamber. What will this Brave New World offer? Plenty of apes, of that we can be sure.
Which brings us to the recent Apes trilogy (Rise – 2011, Dawn – 2014, War – 2017). If you recall Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the plot leaves open the possibility of a fourth entry in the series, as the loss of the spaceship Icarus is mentioned in TV reports and newspapers.
The First Men in the Moon (1964)
The third and best of the four adaptations of HG Wells 1901 novel was released in 1964.
The movie begins with the framing device of a UN space mission finding a Union Jack on the Moon’s surface, with an attached note claiming the sphere for Queen Victoria.
Doddering nursing home resident Bedford (Edward Judd) relates the strange story of his visit to the Moon in 1899 and ensuing encounter with the Selenites, creepy insectoid lunar inhabitants led by the super-intelligent big-brained Grand Lunar.
The last version of the story was BBC4’s cheap-as-chips 2010 TV movie written by and starring Mark Gatiss.
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