Space Cowboys Review by Tim Wick
Are you ready for Geezers in Space?
I'm gonna be firing off some spoilers in this review because I just really
need to. If you go see the movie anyway, don't worry. All of this stuff is
so clumsily telegraphed that you would have figured it out anyway.
A movie like Space Cowboys will make you rush to
plug in your copy of The
Right Stuff or
Apollo 13 just because you have a desperate need to get
the bad taste out of your mouth. Though it is certainly not on par with the
true awfulness that is Mission to Mars, this movie is a great example of
everything that is wrong with the Hollywood blockbuster machine.
This is nothing more than a by the numbers
comedy/drama/thriller/romance/espionage/disease movie. You take a bunch of
Hollywood old guys, mix in an unlikely story about some stolen US technology
on a Russian relic of the cold war and you get a bunch of old guys in space
suits saving the world in slow motion (because that's how you move in
space).
The movie is fairly promising at first. The band of intrepid old guys are a
quartet of reliable actors (Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Donald Sutherland
and Tommy Lee Jones). They have a pretty good chemistry on the screen and
manage to create differing personalities despite the fact that the only
thing the movie seems concerned with pointing out about them is the fact
that they are old. A lot of amusing training scenes ensue with the old guys
trying to prove to the young bucks at NASA that they still have the right
stuff.
The young bucks, by the way, are useless. Loren Dean (Apollo 13) and
Courtney Vance (The Hunt for Red October) play the young guys who go into
space with the express purpose of proving their uselessness in the face of
heavy odds. Instead of being an example of the best NASA would have to
offer, these two are just cocky kids who really have no idea how to deal
with a critical situation and just get themselves knocked unconscious so the
geezers will have to deal with the problem. The only problem is the fact
that the geezers end up having to deal with a couple limp crew members and
that makes it tougher for them to prove how good they really are.
I'm not even going to go into the science problems with this film. I don't
need to. The movie collapses under it's own weight so quickly, I lost
interest in tallying the scientific inaccuracies.
Plot holes were a bit harder to miss. Eastwood's character has a wife who
is in a few scenes at the beginning and then mysteriously disappears when he
gets ready to head into space. One could assume she would be a bit annoyed
by his septuagenarian wet dream that could easily result in his death. We
have to assume it because we never get to see it. The two young buck
astronauts are pushed out of the shuttle in an emergency evacuation during
the landing and we never hear from them again. Did they make it? I didn't
care, but I'm guessing someone did. The head of the mission was a jerky
codger who was the cause of the whole problem and we never saw him have to
answer for his crimes. He could have been responsible for the destruction
of half the United States and he came out smelling like a rose. That was
hardly the ending his character deserved. All this choppy script writing
seemed to indicate that all the producers really wanted was another old guy
joke instead of some genuine character development.
One more thing that bears mentioning is the completely drab score that
almost manages to work counter to the movie itself. When the movie is
supposed to be tense, the score is calm. When it's supposed to be
thrilling, the score is calm. When it's supposed to be calm, the score is
silent. I might expect such a varied presentation from a lullaby, but I was
trying to watch a movie.
Finally, I have to say that the ending shot of this movie was just about the
lamest film ending I have seen in a long time.
This movie has it's fun moments, but it is uninspired film making. Clint
Eastwood may have won the Oscar for directing Unforgiven, but he probably
should stay out of the directors chair for movies like this one. The word
"Cowboys" may be in the title, but this is not even as good as a spaghetti
western in space.
Clint should stick to what he knows.
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