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At the dawn of the Space Race, seven test pilots set out to become the first American astronauts to enter space. However, the road to making history brings momentous challenges.
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one of the great entertainments.and golly gee whiz did it inspire INTERSTELLAR. it also inspired this entry to be so uninteresting, because i watched the film for a piece related to Interstellar, which is the film that has completely sapped my critical faculties dry this weekend.
“There was a demon who lived in the air…”Director Phillip Kauffman’s love letter to the Mercury Space Program is really a love letter to a certain ephemeral essence. It can easily be dismissed as a love letter to American exceptionalism, provided you overlook its constant, subtle and not so subtle reminders that even in its finest hour, America had - and has - a long, long way to go. The Right Stuff loves America deeply without ever losing perspective.It’s influence can be found everywhere and it ranks high on my list of films that shouldn’t exist yet somehow do.
73/100Begins and ends weakly: the Yeager prologue strains too hard to be iconic (and is rife with tin-eared dialogue, unlike the rest of the movie—"We did it! We finally broke the sound barrier" someone cries, as if anyone in earshot or in the audience hadn't worked that out—while the epilogue ("And for a brief moment, Gordo Cooper became the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen") just feels like a cheap shot...especially given that it's spoken by Levon Helm, who also plays Yeager's gum-loaning wingman. But the arrival of Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer in minor roles heralds a marvelous change of pace, and Kaufman's affectionate satire of the Mercury program's training regimen and PR campaign enlivens docudrama conventions by focusing on the stuff that's usually elided: semen samples, José Jiménez impressions, inconveniently full bladders during stalled missions. Superb storytelling instincts, too—the smash cut from Glenn's harrowing re-entry right into his ticker-tape parade, for example, is truly inspired (and also weirdly seems to anticipate that we'd end up watching the same basic scene anyway, with Ed Harris on the ground, a dozen years later in Apollo 13). IMPORTANT: If you give a performance as hugely charismatic as Dennis Quaid's, and suddenly have a shot at major stardom, choose your vehicles wisely. They should not be Dreamscape and Enemy Mine.
The film follows the Mercury Seven astronauts, a group of test pilots selected for America's first crewed spaceflight program, as they navigate the immense personal and political pressures of the early Space Race.
Philip Kaufman directed the 1983 film, which is based on the book by Tom Wolfe.
The film received four Academy Awards at the 1984 ceremony, including honors for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.
