The Right Stuff

7/20/2023

**Overall, it's a good movie about the start of the space race.** The space race was one of the aspects that marked the intense rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. There was the notion that space could be a battleground or a zone of influence, as colonial territories had been decades before, and that the nuclear threat made it urgent to dominate space. That's why the Mercury Program was born, responsible for the first suborbital and orbital flights carried out by the USA. Directed by Philip Kaufman, the film is very good and very well made, even if, at times, it resembles an expensive advertisement for NASA and what was done by the North Americans in the space race. It is a long film, with three hours, but that is justified by covering a large period of

10/7/2026

As propaganda films go this one checks all the boxes. Let's go over a few of them. We've got some white male americans boasting about being the best at one thing or another. We've historical figures being portrayed as one dimensional caricatures. We've got some pretend germans with pretend fake german accents doing some pretend science. We've got some rewriting of history in favor of bad skits with attempted humour. We've got Dennis Quaid doing his best Jack Nicholson smirk impression. We even got a badly dubbed Giant Gonzales (that's not a racial joke on my part, there's an actual giant named Gonzales in the movie with an english voiceover) just to get a shameful joke in. We've got all of that packaged in just 190 minutes that just fly by. If this bill of goods was cut by about an hou