Powerful

I'll tell you why so serious

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This movie was awesome when it came out. I saw it and thought "wow what an awesome movie! I want to be an astronaut". However when I started to learn about the US Space Program and NASA I started to realize that the director and writers for this movie overstepped their rights for artistic license.So much of this movie is made up and bullshit that it is more fiction than it is truth. In fact, my research has led me to believe that 7/10 scenes in this movie are completely fabricated. Even character names, quotes and actions were changed for a variety of reasons, most common to make the movie fit a narrative of the director and writers.Listing all the problems with the movie would take too much time and effort for me. However I'll say that if you forget about all the real life facts and suspend your reality for a few hours, it isn't a bad movie.I did like this movie when it was released but over time it has lost the glimmer and shine. There are much better, more realistic, more historical movies out about the space race and NASA program.

Based upon the book by Tom Wolfe, the subject matter and thematic content is 'a pooch that can't be screwed' in the words of that venerable old ace pilot Chuck Yeager as played by Sam Shepherd. I actually would have preferred seeing John Travolta play Yeager because of the undeniable physical resemblance and Travolta's well documented love of flying, but real life Yeager's cameo in the film is amusing and one can say makes up for the missed call about Travolta. This film is a fascinating exposition of the Western Ethos, which, among other things, asserts that you can figure it out and do something about it and that there is paradise on the other side of The New Frontier should you be willing to risk life and limb and accept this mission. This film is very interesting to compare with THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and of course, Kurosawa's internationally acclaimed SEVEN SAMURAI. While it would be presumptuous of me to claim it has the stature of the Kurosawa masterpiece, it deals with similar issues of bravery, duty and the willingness to sacrifice for values and ideals that are larger than oneself.Having read the book, I was somewhat disappointed that all six missions were not presented in a telescoping and accelerated manner, as the book was an excellent breakdown of different salient points of the Space Program in its embryonic beginnings. Scott Carpenter's mission was important to the film because he was actually doing experiments in the manner of a Space Scientist. He got so involved in his experiments he missed his landing site by over a hundred miles. Or was it a malfunction of the automatic stabilizer? Hmmnnn...? Wally Schirra's mission which was composed of maneuvering tests got more thoroughly into the actual mechanics of how one would pilot a craft in space and would have been interesting to see on film. A shame these missions were omitted. That being said, one cannot argue against the spell cast upon the viewer by the picaresque and elegiac flow of scenes and the compelling and at times rousing musical score of Bill Conti.Since I lived through the events of the Mercury program and remember vividly John Glenn's conversationally homey way of sharing his experience with all the world, the film has a great sense of resonance with me. Until the moon landing, it was probably the greatest reality show of its day. Ed Harris captures the force of the Glenn persona perfectly. Scott Glenn also gives us a fully colored, multi-layered Alan Shepard. The rest of the crew from Fred Ward as Gus Grissom to Scott Paulin as Deke Slayton to Lance Heriksen as Wally Schirra and Pamela Reed playing Trudy Cooper with Dennis Quaid as her husband Gordon Cooper to all the rest of the astronauts' wives and Barbara Hersey as Glennis Yeager as well as Kim Stanley as Poncho Barnes round out an ensemble that makes this more a character driven story in spite of its technological trappings and gravitas.But make no mistake, despite all the humor and memorable quotes by the truckload, this is a film that casts technology in an almost religious light and posits test pilots as members of a priesthood inevitably prone to spawn martyrs. Like the single combat warriors of a bygone age that Wolfe compares them to, or the samurai of more recent times, it appears that they live by a code as binding as the Bushido. Something unspoken and unwritten that has to be lived to be fully understood. Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeager as a combination of Wyatt Earp, Abe Lincoln and Daniel Boone. He is all that the Western Heroic Mythos is about. The willingness to handle deadly force, the careful judiciousness of a humble servant of the people just doing his duty, the restless spirit of a frontiersmen anxious to play a part in a pioneering vision. Whether this is actually Chuck Yeager or not, it is still an attractive and charismatic portrayal.The last scenes say it all. While not as stirring as it was in the book, the scene involving Chuck Yeager's reach for the edge of Space, while the public relations machine all about LBJ grinds and dances around the Mercury Seven, still nails down that quality beyond macho that you find in a good parent, a good teacher, a good scientist or artist or inventor or a skilled expert at his trade having the time of his or her life against all odds. When the narrator who started this whole thing comes back in to wrap it all up the way Mark Twain would, we have a sense that we may have finally gotten a glimpse of people, warts and all, who truly have the - What was that question again? How many times did Gordon Cooper orbit the Earth? I think he went twenty-two times around, didn't he?

"Is that a man?" asks the pilot of a rescue plane headed towards the crash site of Chuck Yeager's attempt to reach the edge of space in a Lockheed NF-104A. An outline of a man appears on the horizon, blurred by heat and mirage, his face bloody and burned, walking at pace with his helmet in his hand. Yeager's good friend Jack Ridley sits in the passenger seat, having seen Yeager conquer several near-suicidal flight records, including the first to break the sound barrier. Ridley smiles. "You're damn right it is!". The Right Stuff, adapted from Tom Wolfe's best-selling account of the test-pilots in the Mercury Space Program, shows what it takes to be a man; to have the 'right stuff' inhabited by these fearless men, who were the only ones crazy enough to risk everything, on live TV, to beat the Russians in the space race.Besides the many fascinating and frequently hilarious vignettes involving the test pilots - played by a stellar cast of Dennis Quaid, Ed Harris, Fred Ward, Charles Frank, Lance Henriksen, Scott Glenn and Scott Paulin - the movie's real ace-in-the-hole is the juxtaposition of this story with that of Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), a man thought of by his peers to be the finest pilot in the world. Played stoically by an Oscar- nominated Sam Shepard, he is brooding, dusty, a true man's man, but without the college degree needed to join the space program. He is the polar opposite of the 'hot dog's' of the Mercury Program, and when he is not off chasing his wild wife Glennis (Barbara Hershey), he is making sure he is still the fastest man in the world.Even at over 3 hours, the movie is packed with great and memorable scenes. Director Philip Kaufman managed to retain Wolfe's skill for absurd humour, so we get to see the President crawling on the floor to plug in a projector, two astronauts' slow walk to the bathroom following an enema, and a hilarious moment involving humming and sperm samples. It has an observational aesthetic that America conquered in the 1970's, made even better by some amazing aviation and space travel scenes, easily more exciting than the CGI-laden movies we get nowadays. It's often called the second-best movie of the 1980's behind Raging Bull (1980), and, although I don't necessarily agree with that statement (Blue Velvet (1986), anyone?), it's one of the finest movies to come out of it's era, feeling almost classical despite being modern. Like Shepard's Chuck Yeager, The Right Stuff seems old before its time, encompassing wisdom and poignancy with ease.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

This is one of my favourite movies but it is not perfect but that has more to do with the book on which it is based. Tom Wolfe doesn't seem to be sure about whether he wants to write about breaking the sound barrier or the early days of the space program which makes it somewhat bi-polar. I tend to view it as two movies in one and can separate and appreciate both aspects.On the whole it is very well executed and certainly the desert scenes bring a realism to the early test pilot days.I am not sure about some of the acting in the astronaut sequences. I find Dennis Quaid to be especially irritating but don't know whether he is playing character to type, or over-hamming it. I thought his role could have been throttled back somewhat. I also thought the character of Lyndon Johnson was also a bit over-cooked although quite entertaining. My favourite line is when he asks Werner von Braun whether or not 'we can beat the Ruskies?' to which WVB replies 'of course, our Germans are better than their Germans'. Classic.Highly recommended and makes a good companion piece to Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon.