Space is tight
Try to tell me otherwise
I love space. I’ve never been there, but I love it. I follow @nasa and @nasawebb on Instagram. I geek out over black holes and extremely dumbed-down theories of space travel. I RIDE for Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy. I still think about “Introduction to Stars, Galaxies, & the Universe (3 units),” the general elective course I took with my friends freshman year of college. I may not care much for SpaceX or Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic, but I have to admit that if I were a billionaire I’d probably try to visit space in a phallic vessel too. I’m only human. We reach for the stars!!!
It should come as no surprise, then, that I very much enjoy fictional space content. Because the final frontier is harsh and unforgiving, there’s a huge overlap between movies and TV shows set in space and disaster content, which for some reason extends to their quality. Rarely will you see a space movie that’s actually good from a storytelling perspective. But honestly, I don’t care. Just look a few of my short reviews on Wutch, a wonderful app run by friends of mine that replaced the note I kept on my phone with a list of things I wanted to see.
A Million Miles Away follows José Hernández’s journey from a young migrant farm worker to an astronaut. It has pretty predictable overcoming-the-odds story beats, but it’s based on a true story, so yes, it’s inspiring and emotional and space. Bigtime.
Let’s continue. Here’s Stowaway, starring Anna Kendrick:
The movie is about a crew on a mission to Mars that finds an accidental passenger on board whose presence results in a difficult decision…due to the amount of oxygen, and such. Clearly I was disappointed, but hey, the floor is extremely high in space.
Speaking of disappointed, here’s a throwback to 2002’s Solaris, with your boy George Clooney leading the way:
In this one, the wife of George Clooney’s character has recently passed away. When he’s called to take a trip out to check on the messed up crew of a space shuttle orbiting the star Solaris, he starts to go insane over the sudden reappearance of his wife. There’s a lot of empty emotion and very little space going on here—frankly it’s a bad movie. But damn if I didn’t get excited about a young Clooney venturing into the great darkness.
Clooney is actually a big traveler—he’s starred in at least two more space blockbusters. Let’s skip ahead to the most recent, The Midnight Sky:
Okay, he’s actually ground-bound on this one, but his character is a lonely bearded scientist who must race against time to contact an interstellar crew of astronauts about the fact that Earth is suffering from some kind of global environmental catastrophe. Yep! That’ll get me going!
Clooney’s best space movie is easily the 2013 visual epic Gravity, which I spent $33 to see in IMAX. It also has a pretty lacking story, but it’s really fucking cool to watch. As I said, most space content focuses way more on the look and feel of the great beyond than writing or dialogue, be it Star Wars, Star Trek, or Avatar. Even “prestige” fare like The Martian, (D)Ad Astra, and Interstellar basically say, like, yeah so {Matt Damon/Brad Pitt/Matthew McConaughey} are alone and sad for various reasons, but would you just forget about that and look at this insane {planet, planets/moons, and planets/moons/black holes}? To which I respond, “yes, I will.” Dune: Part Two, which I saw in IMAX last week, might be the rare well-rounded space epic, but even its director Denis Villeneuve hates dialogue.
Anyway! I’ve made my point and it is irrefutable. Content that includes even a little bit of beyond-Earth gets a full pass on pretty much any standard measure of quality. Because space is tight. We all know it.