lipman@decwrl.UUCP (02/23/84)
Message-Id: <8402231633.AA29292@decwrl.ARPA>
Date: Thursday, 23 Feb 1984 08:09:30-PST
From: nacho::lynch (You may fire when ready, Gridley)
To: net.movies
Subject: The Right Stuff
< *** SPOILER WARNING *** >
The Right Stuff finally reached the boonies last week (it's been playing
around Boston for a LONG time but I'm not into driving forever) and I rushed
right out to see it.
Boy, what a disappointment!
I had read the Tom Wolfe book and heard many good things about this flick
so I maybe anticipated too much. But I found this to be a mediocre film.
My complaints:
1) Special effects were not good. There's only so much you can do with a
Mercury capsule; it was a BORING spacecraft.
2) The approach the director took was too light-hearted. He seemed to go after
cheap laughs (the scene in the capital when Johnson and Eisenhower were
getting the news about sputnik was unnecessarily silly). This was serious
stuff! The scenes where the astronauts view (over and over again) the
rockets exploding on the pad were played for humor. What was funny about
that?
3) The screenplay played fast and loose with the facts. The scenes mentioned
in (2) have no basis in fact. They seemed to want to create a mythos
surrounding these men rather than presenting them in an historical frame
work. The early scenes give the impression that Yeager just one day climbed
into the X-1 and (BOOM!) broke the sound barrier. In actuality, he trained
for months and made many, many flights before tackling the barrier. It just
wasn't as simple as the film implies.
Also, the aborigine fire scene was a complete fiction! That scene lent an
unnecessarily mystical aura to the incident of the sparks.
Now, don't get me wrong, there were good things in this film. The acting was
excellent and several scenes (those taken from the book and therefore based
on facts) were well done (Glenn confronting his fellows over their "extra-
curricular activities"; the "unveiling of the 7" scenes; several of the
blastoff sequences; Johnson rebuffed from visiting Annie Glenn). The film is
beautifully photographed.
But the bottom line is that the film is just not historically accurate. I
really don't think that America needs to build the astronauts up into any
sort of "greater than mortal" status. The one thing that the book accomplished
was presenting the astronauts as men, pure and simple, with weaknesses and
faults. The book really examined the psychology of "the right stuff"; the
film mentions it in passing. If the film had accurately translated the themes
of the book, it would have been a better film.
Rating on a 1-10 scale: 6
-- Bill Lynch
USPS: Digital Equipment Corp / ZKO2-1/M11
110 Spit Brook Road / Nashua, NH 03082
Tele: (603) 881-2837
UUCP: {decvax,allegra,ucbvax}!decwrl!rhea!nacho!lynch
ARPA: decwrl!rhea!nacho!lynch@{Berkeley,SU-Shasta}