I think I might have seen The Right Stuff before at a childhood friend’s home, but only the second half. My memory is a bit hazy. Was there a two part, extra=long TV version? If so, we skipped to the second part where the Mercury 7 showed up and not so much the stuff with Chuck Yeager, but when I watched the movie, the Yeager stuff was done fairly early. Point is, it’s a three hour movie even on its own, and I got to it for its final day on HBO Max.
Besides, Ed Harris even today has a look that makes me think he looks like someone who could work for NASA.
The Right Stuff opens with the daring test pilots looking to break the sound barrier, eventually done by Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), a man who is so much of a Wild West figure that the first time we see him, he’s riding in on a horse to view the experimental jet. Yeager’s success attracts a lot of other young pilots, notably Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordo Cooper (Dennis Quaid). Meanwhile, fears that the Soviets will win the space race prompt the government to go find the finest pilots (provided they meet certain criteria) to become what will eventually be the Mercury 7. From there, the movie tracks the space flights of Grissom, Cooper, John Glenn (Harris), and Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), and how they reacted to their sudden celebrity, NASA engineers who didn’t seem to really want pilots so much as someone to just sit in the capsule and do nothing, and wives who have their own concerns and problems when they may not be sure their husbands are coming back. And every so often, the movie checks in with Yeager as he will sometimes comment on the action or just break an air speed record for the hell of it.
There’s a lot to like about The Right Stuff. True, this is a fairly romanticized version of the early days of the Space Race. The Mercury 7 astronauts clash very early on exactly once when moral, family man Glenn argues with the others about being a good example at all times until the group realizes they need to be united and helpful to each other to make sure they get anything they want out of NASA rather than just be treated as basically lab monkeys. But I remember watching First Man, the Neil Armstrong story, and being struck by how a movie that made what the astronauts do look so dangerous while at the same time making Armstrong himself somewhat dull. The thing that made Armstrong a great astronaut and hero–his unflappable nature and courage–also made him a rather uninteresting character for a drama. Here, the astronauts all do display a good deal of personality while still being brave and courageous men. Shepard has a passion for a dated, racist spaceman character on TV. Grissom and Cooper are the best of friends. Glenn is very protective of his wife, a woman who is obviously uncomfortable with fame. And meanwhile, Yeager is basically some sort of moral arbiter of pilots, a man who knows when other pilots do the right thing while silently sizing up whatever is going on.
It’s also a movie that has a decent sense of humor about itself. When the Soviets get something done first and a breathless government aide bursts into a closed door meeting with the news, he’s always told the older men inside already know before he can finish. There’s a debate over what to do when Shepard, locked up in his spacesuit, has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the countdown. A Latino orderly gets back at racist humor using his knowledge of where the bathrooms are during an enema test. And no one really seems to want Lyndon Johnson inside their house.
Sure, it could be argued this is just a lot of unquestioned blind patriotism, and when the worst thing that any of the astronauts do is arguably when Grissom’s pod mysteriously blew a hatch and sank into the ocean. Anyone looking for a look into complex men who did a lot of amazing work will be disappointed. Anyone looking for just a simple story of what heroism might be alongside some compelling stories about daring men looking to leave the grip of Earth’s gravity, well, this movie is the right place to go.
Grade: A-
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