Movie - the Right stuff

Movie - the Right stuff
Score : 4/10
Year : 1983
Director: Philip Kaufman

Country : USA
Language : English

Duration : 3h13 (this isn't a typo!)


This is the story of the original Merucry 7 astrunauts, their bravoury or crazy-danger-seeking-selves, in their space race against russia... it actually starts before, with test pilots breaking mach 1, and ends with Gordon Cooper's flight into 22 orbits around Earth. (all stuff you probably read about, right ?)

Now, on imdb, this has a high 7.9 score, i don't find it to be all that great, and would rate it down to 5 /10 as it is way too long, even tho the movie does bring some light to the human relations, and the astronauts' wives and their angst over their husbands returning safely from dangerous missions which makes it a little more interesting that the basic space flight stuff, but 3 hours & 5 minutes is just way too long for something that could have lasted 1 hour less than that, really... since we got lenghty scenes with various tests the astrunauts were going through, as well as a couple with chimps, and lastly, a texas style party celebrating the astraunauts, showing some dead corpse being roasted, no thank you, i didn't need to see that, at all.

I did like the special effects (did they really see things as depicted ?), and most of the music, and especially Ed Harris's performance of John Glenn & his unwavering support of his wife, thus saving this movie from a much worse score.

However, i don't plan to watch it again, it's a 1 time only and what little charm was there, is now gone.

I will say, nontheless, that on the technical level of filming a fake-real docudrama about space flights here is quite good. I just wish it were a 2 hour movie, as here lenght was not a charming point...

The acting was good overall, but in the end, this is probably a bit too much of a macho man's movie, which is probably why i didn't fully enjoy it, coz I ain't that macho kind