NASA’s Opportunity and Spirit rovers didn’t shoot cinematic-quality footage of Mars, but this documentary offers the next-best thing.
NASA’s Opportunity Rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and chugged along for more than 14 years before giving out. (In February 2019, NASA declared the mission over.) Opportunity’s anticipated time in service — a span that Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission, is heard likening in “Good Night Oppy” to a warranty — was only around 90 days. Oppy, and to a lesser extent its sister rover, Spirit, which “died” several years earlier, was the robot geologist that refused to quit.
Neither rover, alas, shot cinematic-quality footage of the red planet, but in this documentary from Ryan White (“Assassins,” on the killing of Kim Jong-nam), visual effects work from Industrial Light & Magic allows viewers to imagine they’re exploring craters and bedrock right alongside the androids. The orange- and copper-blasted images are convincing enough that moviegoers might be fooled, but the technique never plays like an unreasonable sleight of hand.
Similarly, the way “Good Night Oppy” anthropomorphizes the robots might sound like pure Hollywood hokum. (The movie, unusually for a documentary, is graced by the imprimatur of Amblin Entertainment.) But White, through interviews and archival footage, makes clear that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., couldn’t help but regard these bots as living things.
Kobie Boykins, a mechanical engineer who was instrumental in building the rovers, recalls getting tingles at Opportunity’s first steps. Vandi Verma, who sometimes piloted the rovers from Earth, says that each one had its own personality. (Driving a Mars rover, we learn, does not offer the instant gratification of turning a steering wheel, because of the time it takes commands to reach Mars.) In keeping with a tradition observed by human astronauts, Opportunity and Spirit were given a blast of pop music to wake up in the morning.
“Good Night Oppy” accelerates the decade-plus saga into a suspenseful series of close calls. We hear of how the scientists had to design the rovers in time to make the alignment of the planets; failing would mean being set back by more than two years. Solar flares damaged the rovers’ software en route. And once “Good Night Oppy” finds Opportunity and Spirit safely on opposite sides of Mars, the movie recounts one near-mishap after another, as the droids survive dust storms, lose contact with the humans, encounter steep drop-offs or get caught in sand. Some problems require scientists to play around in sandbox simulations on Earth.
The pace is snappy enough that it’s easy to forget just how long many of these maneuvers took. Sometimes the rovers’ travels from one destination to another lasted years, and it’s hard not to gasp as title cards tick off the passage of time. And while descriptions of the aging robots as experiencing arthritis and memory loss are perhaps too cute, by the end of “Good Night Oppy,” Opportunity and Spirit have become no less lovable as characters than R2-D2 or Wall-E. It’s tough not to feel for their loss.
Good Night Oppy
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
