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review by Luca Brasi
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Space Cowboys (sung to "home on the range") Oh give me a movie with Clint, he's quite groovy, and Tommy Lee Jones by his side... with James Garner at hand and Donald Sutherland, on an old folks's space shuttle ride... Okay, that's all the non-Sting related cowboy songs I know. Anyway, to the film! Lord, I would have loved to be in the studio office when they were pitching this. "We're going to send four old fogeys... get this... into SPACE"! I'll avoid any old-timer jokes, they got old right after John Glenn went up anyway. Clint Eastwood ('Unforgiven'), Tommy Lee Jones ('Lonesome Dove'), James Garner ('Maverick') and Donald Sutherland (well, I can't think of any film that he was a cowboy in) play- ah, it doesn't matter about the character names, they practically play themselves anyway - 1950s astronauts that miss out on a moon mission when their superiors decide to instead send a trained monkey. Fast forward top circa now, and there's a very old soviet communications satellite about to crash into Earth, and the only man who can repair it is... Clint. Their excuse is that he designed the satellite's computer systems. So, the NASA boys reluctantly decide to send him up, and to spite his former superiors he brings in his old team, and I mean OLD, to accompany him on the mission. Oh well, now we've got all the plot we need. The rest is a lot of "old man in space" jokes, a lot of technical babble, and since this is Hollywood, the physics book has been thrown out the window (complete ignorance of proper spaceflight procedures, you can hear whooshing sounds in space, etc). Wait, that's never a bad thing. Sometimes it's good to have a film that you can just willfully suspend any disbelief and enjoy the spaceflight. And there's a lot to like - the actors all play the roles we've come to enjoy (you know what I mean, you can watch any Tommy Lee Jones film and he's usually the same charcter, 'Natural Born Killers' and 'JFK' notable exceptions), and there's a lot of space action. It's one of those films that isn't out to tell any big story or make a brilliant point, it's just there to entertain, and it's an enjoyable film. Just don't rush to see it. You might break a hip. |