Who knew that a documentary about a robot could leave you verklempt? The inspiring drama that propels âGood Night Oppyâ (â â â, now streaming on Amazon Prime) is the narrative of how NASA scientists put a pair of mobile data collectors dubbed Spirit and Opportunity on the surface of Mars, where they were meant to go about their tasks and expire after three months. Instead, they kept going and going and going, with Opportunity tooling around the Red Planet until 2019, a full fifteen years past its shelf date.
The filmâs emotional storyline, though, is something else entirely â a testament to the ways humans are drawn to anthropomorphize and even sentimentalize their work. You wonât find a more dedicated group of STEM diehards than the crew of rocket scientists and mechanical engineers headed up by Steve Squyres at the space agencyâs Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA. Numbers wonks to a man and woman, they nevertheless describe the two Mars Rovers to director Ryan White as âchildren,â âfriends,â âfamily members.â âSpirit was troublesome [but] Opportunity was Little Miss Perfect,â one of the robotics engineers says about two machines that were built to be identical twins. âItâs just a box of wires, right?â says someone else, and he doesnât sound at all convinced. Were the robots built at a human height and with cameras spaced to mimic human eyes so they would âseeâ from a human perspective â or just because we need to make things in our own images? The movie raises the question but is too dazzled by wonder to answer it.
And thereâs plenty of wonder to go around. The missionâs purpose was to ascertain whether Mars had ever had water that might have supported life, microbial or otherwise. (Sorry, no spoilers.) Getting the two Rovers to Mars was itself a miracle of timing and trajectory, âlike hitting a golf ball in Los Angeles and trying to hit a door handle in Buckingham Palace,â according to one engineer. Once on the surface, what Spirit and Opportunity âsawâ were black-and-white still images of the Martian surface, sent back to Earth along with other data over ten minutes of interplanetary travel time. Which isnât terribly cinematic, so when âGood Night Oppyâ shows us âfootageâ of the two Rovers making their way across the Martian surface, weâre watching a digital re-enactment, complete with swooping crane shots and dramatic camera angles. The movieâs a crowd-pleasing real-life âWall-Eâ in more ways than one, albeit more sentimentalized than the Pixar classic. The score tends toward the tinkly and beatific, and actress Angela Bassett has been cued to narrate in overly reverent tones. Such touches pull âGood Night Oppyâ toward the science-museum field-trip end of the spectrum. The individuality and sheer delight of the scientists and the astonishing endurance of the Rovers drag it back toward a real movie, one suitable for thoughtful grown-up engagement and enjoyment.
âGood Night Oppyâ is a good movie to watch with older kids, too, especially ones with a math or science bent or who just like taking things apart to see how they work. Almost all of the NASA team members tell Whiteâs cameras about childhood dreams of space exploration, of being driven by curiosity to find things out, and the movie seems to cock its head toward a young viewer as if to say, âYou too?â By the final scenes, as Opportunity goes into its second decade â Spirit lasted eight years before conking out in a Martian dust storm â the Pasadena team includes three women scientists who saw the launch as children and teenagers and who signed up in their minds then and there. In its own magnanimous way, âGood Night Oppyâ is a recruitment film.
Some critics have carped that the movie goes overboard in its attempt to humanize the Mars Rover program â that it doesnât let scientists be, you know, scientists. Listening to the actual scientists dispels that argument, simply because they seem so eager to superimpose personalities onto their two âboxes of wires.â When Opportunityâs mechanical joints start to freeze up around Year 10, itâs described as âarthritis,â and when the Rover begins to break down and erase the data collected at the end of each day, itâs likened to the Alzheimers that a grandmother of one of the scientists was diagnosed with at around the same time. Even the communications sent by Spirit and Opportunity were coded to mimic human agency and autonomy, and when Spirit âsaysâ toward the end of her life, âMy battery is low and itâs getting dark,â itâs very hard not to think of HAL 9000 in â2001: A Space Odyssey,â mourning a âdeathâ itâs powerless to stop. The movie raises an inadvertent question: Do we need to invest our miracles of science with personalities before we can properly admire them? Would we be less amazed if the robots were just robots without names and facial physiognomy? Would Opportunity be lost?
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