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New Century of Cinema
DOWSE Guide to the
Movies
by Tony Lee editor of
Pigasus
Press
Space Cowboys
129 minutes (12) widescreen 2.35:1
Director: Clint Eastwood
review by Tony Lee
Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys is a curiously romantic adventure with some good
performances and yet, overall, it's uninspired, emotionally transparent and - sadly -
utterly predictable.
It's flat without being leaden, solid but not impressive. It certainly has one
or two dramatic moments, though its general tone - which shifts jarringly from everyday realism to
to technological fantasy - reminded me of Eastwood's earlier Firefox, with a
bit of Ron Howard's winningly authentic Apollo 13 thrown in for good measure.
There's plenty of fine acting but not much action in the somewhat talky first part,
then the show becomes a more visually oriented piece of cinema as the quartet of
pensionable astronauts reach orbit in the space shuttle and attempt to fix a faulty
Russian satellite. That's when the special effects cut in, bigtime.
Unfortunately, that's just too little and too late. This is not Armageddon
for the over-60s, there's not much happening here. Although the film doesn't quite
fall apart before the end, there's a certain distance opens up between the actors and
the space hardware once they blast-off. They all seemed more comfortable down on the
ground playing with real NASA toys at the astronauts' training centre. I wasn't
convinced these old pilots and boffins, played by Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, James
Garner and Tommy Lee Jones truly believed they were above the Earth in the important
climactic scenes - and if they didn't believe in this wish-upon-a-star fiction, then
I couldn't either. Unlike the cast of Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, who all
seemed far more committed to their (true life) roles than Eastwood's imaginary 'Team
Daedalus', these geriatric guys are stubbornly unwilling to admit they're obsolete -
all because they were made redundant back in the late fifties, when NASA took over the
US space programme from the Air Force. They're not the trail-blazing pioneer rocket-jocks
of those glory days, they're too-obviously just movie-star icons milking a one
idea plot based on the high concept that anything politicians like Senator John Glenn
can do, Hollywood's finest can do better.
That's not to say Space Cowboys is a dead loss. It is likeable, I suppose,
but it's not the least bit exciting, really. No, it's just like SpaceCamp for
grownups.
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