DISQUS

John Toradze · 2 years ago

This is a very silly movie with multiple basketball sized pills to swallow, that somehow succeeds on the basis of the acting and ...

Major biffs: Rocket takes off from a hole dug inside a barn? The hole has no exit ports, and there is no launch pad cooling system, which means that huge blowtorch called a rocket engine would probably melt the exhaust nozzles of the rocket. The barn is wood, and it doesn't catch fire. A rocket with a burn that will put it in orbit going sideways? Would not be survivable unless the astronaut hit the excape button. (Why not do that? Authentic, and more dramatic to do that.) He has no lawsuits after his rocket takes out the gate where the journalists were waiting and goes off over the landscape? Come now. In America?

But, it had a certain something. I was surprised at the end how many people were in the theater. I think it shows how interested in space travel for ordinary people we are.

Would have been better if they had talked to Orbital Sciences and featured Orbital's new rocket engine that can burn inside plexiglass and you can put your hand on it and it feels cool. And there is that engineer down in Solvang who built an amazing carbon fiber composite rocket to compete for the X-Prize. He should have been the model for the guy in the movie. He really did almost everything the Charlie Farmer character did. Or at least his rocket should have been in the movie. The movie budget could easily have finished that guy's rocket and actually flown it even. Now how cool would THAT have been. And talk about publicity!

There are real people out there building real rockets that look like something transported in time from the future. Wasn't necessary to use the Atlas design. Reality is so much better than that. So the movie could have been much better than it was. But it still somehow succeeds.

Charlie Farmer · 2 years ago

Response to Mr. Toradze:
If you're so smart (even though you spelled escape, e-x-c-a-p-e), why don't you build a rocket?