DVD Thoughts: The Dream Is Alive
Mar. 1st, 2015 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerPassing through the public library, I happened on a shelf of "non-fiction" DVDs, and when, going by the familiar Dewey decimal system, I saw how many discs on space exploration were there I took a closer look. Seeing that one of the discs was the IMAX documentary The Dream Is Alive, I decided to sign it out. While I've known for a while now how a fair number of short IMAX films are available on DVD, squashing one of them down into even the biggest "home theatre" (and my setup isn't close to being one of them) hadn't seemed worth spending money on even before DVD changed from "the advanced format" to "the plebeian format." This, of course, was different.
My family had gone on a vacation to Florida at the very beginning of 1986; we took a day trip to Cape Canaveral where we saw Columbia (we discussed making a very early morning's start to see its scheduled launch, but decided against it; the launch kept being delayed until after we'd flown north anyway) and Challenger (hearing about the lessons Christa McAuliffe was going to give from space had me wondering if we'd get to see them at our school but dwelling on how few channels, all of them domestic, our antenna picked up at home) off in the distance on their launch pads. I have an impression, if no certainty, that we saw this movie there, but even if we didn't I still would have been interested in it now. I thought a bit, of course, of how the year on film in the movie has now been consumed along with many others in "anti-mythology," caught by an attitude that at least includes "since you're not going to the moon, anything you can do doesn't impress me," but also of how twice as much time now separates it from now as did 1969 from it. There is, of course, that awareness that the "double sonic boom" that announces the space shuttle landing that opens the film was the sound not heard at the end of Columbia's last mission, and how the solid rocket boosters separating in a later sequence were the original leaky design that kept singing the O-rings in them until one day was just too cold for them. In the end, though, I guess I'm just inclined to feel sympathetic for the put-upon.
The first bit of music in the film sounded pretty "synth-heavy"; that much by itself was enough to start casting me back to the 1980s (along with the glossy blue jackets and convertible cargo pants the astronauts wore back then), and also contrasted a bit with the earnest NASA documentaries that can be found online for viewing, if now very weather-beaten. Some of the ground-filmed images are framed in such a way as to look "distant" on a TV screen, even if I know they'd look different at huge size on an IMAX screen. However, it was certainly interesting to see launches from different perspectives than what seemed to wind up as a very set pattern of cutting from camera to camera in the official streaming video. I remembered my brother will dwell at times on how "every IMAX movie has to have a shot from a helicopter in it", and after a while I had to admit this film, too, had a shot from a helicopter in it. In following Walter Cronkite's narration I noticed how he mentioned there were now astronauts from different countries without naming Marc Garneau as the country label on the uniform sports shirt of the first Canadian astronaut showed up, but later noticed how he'd named Mike Mullane, whose autobiography I've read (although I did later donate my copy of it to a library book sale). The movie did manage, in featuring the happy-ending improvisation of the rescue and repair of the Solar Max satellite and the test of a folding solar array, to point forward from "it might not be the nostalgia everyone dwells on, but it's nostalgia for me."
My family had gone on a vacation to Florida at the very beginning of 1986; we took a day trip to Cape Canaveral where we saw Columbia (we discussed making a very early morning's start to see its scheduled launch, but decided against it; the launch kept being delayed until after we'd flown north anyway) and Challenger (hearing about the lessons Christa McAuliffe was going to give from space had me wondering if we'd get to see them at our school but dwelling on how few channels, all of them domestic, our antenna picked up at home) off in the distance on their launch pads. I have an impression, if no certainty, that we saw this movie there, but even if we didn't I still would have been interested in it now. I thought a bit, of course, of how the year on film in the movie has now been consumed along with many others in "anti-mythology," caught by an attitude that at least includes "since you're not going to the moon, anything you can do doesn't impress me," but also of how twice as much time now separates it from now as did 1969 from it. There is, of course, that awareness that the "double sonic boom" that announces the space shuttle landing that opens the film was the sound not heard at the end of Columbia's last mission, and how the solid rocket boosters separating in a later sequence were the original leaky design that kept singing the O-rings in them until one day was just too cold for them. In the end, though, I guess I'm just inclined to feel sympathetic for the put-upon.
The first bit of music in the film sounded pretty "synth-heavy"; that much by itself was enough to start casting me back to the 1980s (along with the glossy blue jackets and convertible cargo pants the astronauts wore back then), and also contrasted a bit with the earnest NASA documentaries that can be found online for viewing, if now very weather-beaten. Some of the ground-filmed images are framed in such a way as to look "distant" on a TV screen, even if I know they'd look different at huge size on an IMAX screen. However, it was certainly interesting to see launches from different perspectives than what seemed to wind up as a very set pattern of cutting from camera to camera in the official streaming video. I remembered my brother will dwell at times on how "every IMAX movie has to have a shot from a helicopter in it", and after a while I had to admit this film, too, had a shot from a helicopter in it. In following Walter Cronkite's narration I noticed how he mentioned there were now astronauts from different countries without naming Marc Garneau as the country label on the uniform sports shirt of the first Canadian astronaut showed up, but later noticed how he'd named Mike Mullane, whose autobiography I've read (although I did later donate my copy of it to a library book sale). The movie did manage, in featuring the happy-ending improvisation of the rescue and repair of the Solar Max satellite and the test of a folding solar array, to point forward from "it might not be the nostalgia everyone dwells on, but it's nostalgia for me."