DVD Thoughts: The Right Stuff
Jul. 12th, 2008 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt took me what seemed like quite a while to find an evening open enough to watch a three-hour-plus movie, but I finally managed to watch The Right Stuff. I had read Tom Wolfe's book long before and believe to some extent that it helped reshape the "idea of astronauts" in popular culture (and for a sense of the "previous idea," I often think of 2001's bland, well-adjusted characters), but somehow had never quite got around to watching the movie until I saw a DVD of it in a bin of them, and thought "well, I'm already getting three movies from here, I might as well get a fourth..."
For somebody already familiar with Apollo 13 and Tom Hanks's TV miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," the world shaped on-screen in The Right Stuff felt somehow "stylized," almost exaggerated for effect at times quite comedic. On the other hand, I can imagine how someone having seen The Right Stuff in the 1980s might see those productions from the 1990s as somehow "too reverent." Conscious of the movie's "stylized" history, I was able to contemplate moments like Gus Grissom basically freaking out on splashdown without the annoyance I've seen others (for who he seems pretty much a martyr) display. However, John Glenn reentering the atmosphere seems more interesting to me in Wolfe's book itself.
For somebody already familiar with Apollo 13 and Tom Hanks's TV miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," the world shaped on-screen in The Right Stuff felt somehow "stylized," almost exaggerated for effect at times quite comedic. On the other hand, I can imagine how someone having seen The Right Stuff in the 1980s might see those productions from the 1990s as somehow "too reverent." Conscious of the movie's "stylized" history, I was able to contemplate moments like Gus Grissom basically freaking out on splashdown without the annoyance I've seen others (for who he seems pretty much a martyr) display. However, John Glenn reentering the atmosphere seems more interesting to me in Wolfe's book itself.