The case for Mars (8/8/00)
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Space Cowboys. [Clint Eastwood, 2000. Written by Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner.]
Go ahead, make Chuck Yeager’s day: When an elderly but extremely large Soviet satellite of mysteriously ambiguous function threatens to crash from its decaying orbit into the earth, despicable NASA bureaucrat James Cromwell is forced to his mortal embarrassment to ask cantankerous old fart [but engineering legend] Clint Eastwood to come out of retirement and repair the errant orbiter’s guidance system; which was, apparently, stolen from Eastwood’s own design [now as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls] in a Cold War spy caper which, suspiciously, no one seems to be willing to discuss. Our hero takes this opportunity to strongarm the pencil-pushers into rocketing himself and his team of crusty old buddies [Donald Sutherland, James Garner, and Tommy Lee Jones] into the wild blue yonder to fix the busted bird; naturally they end up saving the world. — Real rockets [and, I guess, real rocket geeks] are the principal attraction here, but though we get to see a shuttle take off it isn’t half as impressive as the fabulous night launch in
Armageddon; the real showstealer is the cameo by the SR-71 Blackbird — still the most beautiful plane ever built, and the epitome of everything in the American aeronautical genius that was stomped flat into bland homogeneity by the creation of NASA. As always, Eastwood knows who the bad guys really are.
____________Me, Myself, and Samuel L. Jackson (7/4/00)
