If you ever start feeling superannuated (though that’s a problem only one or two people receiving this might conceivably have, at least in the near future), this might be the movie for you to see. It’s fun, it’s adventure, it’s about old people. ⁽¹⁾

We start in the Pleasantville — i.e., black-and-white — days of the late fifties, when the Daedalus project (which might better have been named the Icarus project) to put an American into space is well underway; here we see young Air Force officers Hawk Hawkins and Frank Corvin attempting to push a souped-up X-1 to a new altitude record, while fellow team-member Tank Sullivan flies the drop B-52 and Jerry O’Neill sits on the ground in a jeep reading a paper and waiting for them to crash — which they do, of course. And their strait-laced, by-the-book commanding officer, Bob Gerson, immediately cans the whole project in favor of … a chimpanzee.

Cut to present day, forty years later, and see these men as they are, not just hear their lip-synched voices. Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones), a widower, gives people joyrides in a biplane for a living. Frank (Clint Eastwood), a sometime systems engineer, lives in pleasant retirement. Tank (James Garner) is a Baptist minister with a restive congregation. Jerry (Donald Sutherland) is a structural engineer specializing in roller-coaster rides. And Gerson (James Cromwell) … is a strait-laced, by-the-book bureaucrat at NASA, a man with a problem — more than one, as it turns out. The Russian Federation’s only (???) communications satellite, Ikon, is in a rapidly decaying orbit because of a glitch in its guidance system, and the only man left alive who understands that guidance system is its inventor, none other than Frank Corvin. After some hemming and hawing, Gerson agrees to send Corvin up to fix the satellite — something Corvin will do only if his one-time buddies can accompany him. Gerson, of course, has his own agenda — and there is no love lost between him and Frank.

(And what, you may ask, is a guidance system designed by an American doing in a Russian satellite? That’s such a good question that others, including Corvin, keep asking it all the way through the film … believe it or not, there is an answer.)

About a sixth of the film is given over to preliminaries, and half of it to a training program to allow these Geritol (or perhaps Viagra) addicts to prepare themselves for the rigors of flight in the shuttle — or to ease them out, as the case may be. By my arithmetical calculations, this leaves about a third of the film for the actual flight into space, the discovery of Ikon’s true nature, and the film’s climax (excellent SFX here, by the way).

There are aspects of the film that don’t make sense, though they are necessary to make the plot work out properly. Gerson’s behavior goes far beyond what one would expect a man of his character and ethnicity to do to protect himself; he is, after all, more in the position of John Deutch than that of Wen Ho Li (some here may understand this allusion before seeing the film). Ethan Glance’s behavior in orbit is simply incomprehensible. Why Roger Hines is there at all — except, perhaps, to provide minority representation — is never clear; one supposes that he is a competent bus driver … I mean, “shuttle pilot” … but he never gets to demonstrate this. Perhaps he and Chance exist primarily to provide some contrast between their adherence to NASA procedures and the more effective “hot-dogging” of the old-timers.

Scene to watch: the pre-induction physical the four men go through (“Now turn your head and cough!”). Ladies in the audience laughed lustily (I use the term advisedly) when the lady doctor walked in and Frank, Tank and Hawk immediately went into acrobatic contortions to attain strategic cover; Jerry, however, continued to stand proudly at attention (well, at least partially; the camera angle was not such as to permit full disclosure — the doctor, however, seemed most appreciative, both then and later). Covering up Jerry’s physical state, incidentally, is one of the major problems the team has; these days he sees the world through coke-bottle glasses and keeps his teeth in a glass of water at night, not things NASA looks for in its astronauts.

A fun film. ⁽²⁾

⁽¹⁾ Though the Daedalus team are all supposed to be about the same age, the actors who play them range from James Garner (72 this year) down to Tommy Lee Jones (54 this year). In fact, a fourteen-year-old Hawk Hawkins would have been far too young to have participated in that early American spaceflight program …

⁽²⁾ The Internet Movie Database assures us that if you like this film, you’ll also want to see “Virus”, a fairly awful (in the modern sense of the word) 1999 film, in which Donald Sutherland also has a role. I wonder where IMDB ever got this silly idea!