Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Moogega Cooper, Abigail Fraeman, Steve Squyres, Doug Ellison, Rob Manning, Angela Bassett (narrator)
Intro:
… truly shines in demonstrating the relationship between human and machine.
A tender, wondrous, albeit conventionally told documentary, Good Night Oppy will be high on the list of many a science geek and space die hard. The tale of both Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, Ryan White’s film acts as both a deep insight into the processes and challenges that a literal army of engineers and scientists faced, and a reminder of humankind’s need and drive to push the boundaries and go beyond the world we know.
Good Night Oppy follows the epic fifteen-year journey on Mars as told through the scientists, engineers, and overall mad geniuses who built, tinkered, devised and launched both rovers-that-could into the greatest unknown.
Landing on the red planet at the beginning of 2004, and trucking along as much as was possible, both vehicles began their tour of Mars and their search for the holy grail of life – neutral pH balanced water, or at least the remnants of it. Such a discovery could demonstrate that life would have indeed been possible on the planet and help navigate how we treat our own little blue dot in space.
Similar to Damien Chazelle’s First Man, Ryan White’s film effortlessly demonstrates the passion, love, stress, white knuckled persistence and fragility that goes along with an such an endeavour. The documentary reaches nail biting proportions as each wide-eyed member of the NASA team explains the complexity and near impossibility of their mission.
We’re walked through, in fairly meticulous detail, how each and every aspect of the mission has to go perfectly – from the entry orbit time between planets (approximately a two-year window), to the possibly mission ending landing; White’s documentary does a solid job of demonstrating just how eye-of-the-needle the Mars journey was. And that’s before we touch down.
From there, apocalyptic dust storms, lethal winters and getting bogged in red dust all threaten to up end years – literal years – of work and ingenuity; further highlighting just how much of a scientific miracle NASA was able to achieve, especially considering the rovers were at first meant to have a life of 90 sols; sols being Mars hours, but still roughly translating to three months instead of the many years the rovers kept working.
More than anything else, Good Night Oppy acts as a love letter to the mega minds involved and helps tell a tale of human beings who dared to believe they could put billions of dollars of machinery on an alien planet.
Every interview highlights the love and wonder of each team member, from Star Trek geeks to daughters of rocket engineers, space exploration coursing through their veins, and it’s difficult to not feel their enthusiasm and passion. All of this is heavily reinforced through the silken tones of Angela Bassett narrating the daily rover diaries, and the CGI dazzle from VFX powerhouse Industrial Light and Magic. The latter’s sequences provide an almost Pixar-like sincerity; adding a warmth and humanity to the buckets of bolts and microchips, as they trundle and ricket along the desolate surface of Mars.
Where Good Night Oppy truly shines is in demonstrating the relationship between human and machine. Each member of the team cannot help but get misty eyed when thinking about NASA’s “twins”. While they do their best to downplay that Spirit and Opportunity were just a box of wires and a camera, White leans into the connection the creators of the rovers had with their creations. It’s here that White finds the emotional core of this story; when those who dare to dream beyond Earth place all of their hopes, dreams and otherworldly ambitions onto two tin cans of engineering prowess. And as the light goes out on both rovers, you will find yourself getting watery eyed, realising that they’re not merely a box of wires, but in fact the mechanical embodiment of wonder.
