Good Night Oppy

This film plays like a glossy pro­mo­tion­al doc­u­ment of the (admit­ted­ly incred­i­ble) work under­tak­en by NASA’s jet propul­sion engi­neers and robot­ics experts in send­ing two ​“rovers” to Mars in the name of old fash­ioned human endeavour. 

Indeed, the angle here is to reframe Oppor­tu­ni­ty – the nick­name giv­en to one of two rovers blast­ed over 300 mil­lion miles to the Red Plan­et – into a cutesy robo pal who’s all alone and deal­ing with the man­i­fold per­ils of a treach­er­ous, sand-blast­ed wilderness.

Ini­tial­ly, the film is made up of talk­ing head inter­views with the var­i­ous NASA nabobs involved in the project, and there’s much fas­ci­nat­ing lab footage which does well to visu­al­ly express the exact­ing toil of actu­al­ly putting one of these toys togeth­er. And beyond the robot itself, there’s the unfath­omable logis­tics of actu­al­ly post­ing and drop­ping a frag­ile object like this on an inhos­pitable alien plan­et – a nuclear-sized ver­sion of airbag tech­nol­o­gy comes into play in order to ensure Oppor­tu­ni­ty and sis­ter Spir­it aren’t turned into space debris before their time.

Once the rovers have land­ed safe­ly and have begun their pootling about, the film tails off some­what as we’re then treat­ed to scads of ani­mat­ed footage show­ing the pair just rolling across arid plains. There are attempts to force the view­er to invest in their fate – Rocky verge! Dust storm! Dinged-up wheel! – but it all feels a lit­tle false, and at the expense of the actu­al inter­est­ing ques­tion here: how was this all done?

Direc­tor Ryan White deliv­ers an enter­tain­ing, albeit high­ly selec­tive account of this project, brush­ing over any details that might lend this sto­ry a mod­icum of exis­ten­tial weight. The hows and whys are very much on the back-burn­er in favour of anec­do­tal accounts of Opportunity’s voy­age and focus on the ​“emo­tion­al” aspects of keep­ing this bot alive and running. 

It’s a head spin­ning to dis­cov­er that Oppor­tu­ni­ty was up, work­ing and col­lect­ing data for eight years – any­thing over 90 days was con­sid­ered a win. Yet, it’s hard to inject excite­ment into a seg­ment in which the rover trav­els 0.1 miles per hour between craters. The ​“fix” for this is Blake Neely’s bom­bas­tic and insis­tent score which clob­bers the view­er with its feel good vibes. Some­times, this music is so high in the mix that it’s impos­si­ble to hear what the inter­vie­wees are actu­al­ly saying. 

In all, it’s a decent account of an impos­si­ble dream made real, but it’s all far too watered down to have any impact beyond the inspi­ra­tional piece of adver­to­r­i­al that it is. And as a piece of nar­ra­tive, we were hop­ing for Silent Run­ning, but got Short Circuit.