Opportunity Rocks

Yesterday, I teased that two documentaries were making my Top Movie List of 2022. Today I'm blogging about the other: Good Night Oppy.

Available to stream on Prime Video, this documentary is about the Opportunity rover sent by NASA to explore Mars. Expected to last 90 sols (Martian days), the rover went on to be surprisingly long lived. The film documents many of the fascinating scientific discoveries it made, and depicts the hardships it overcame. Moreover, it documents the people who made Opportunity, investing so much of their time and effort into the project that the little rover became like family to them.

My love of space travel -- both fictionalized and real life -- is well chronicled here on my blog. If you share any of that interest (and if you're reading this, chances are high that you do), you will get swept up in Good Night Oppy. At a basic level, I was watching just to learn more about the accomplishments of this Mars rover... and the film certainly delivers that. It's a great look at the science, the engineering achievement, the technical side of space exploration.

But this documentary is equally about the people behind all that. I'm not entirely sure that Good Night Oppy does the best job of answering that question some people often ask ("Why do space exploration?"), but it does show you people for whom that's not even a thinkable question. Their enthusiasm and passion is infectious, and it really makes you empathize with them and understand them.

Consequently, Good Night Oppy is a surprisingly emotional film. In just 105 minutes, you begin to anthropomorphize this little rover nearly as much as you do watching an emotion-seeking missile of a movie like WALL-E. And if it's doing that to you in less than two hours, what of these people who poured years of their lives into the little guy?

There are lovely accents on this story, in the form of a soft and sweet score by composer Blake Neely, and a stately narration by Angela Bassett. But overall, this movie feels almost like a real life Star Trek episode -- space exploration is the background for telling a very human tale.

I give Good Night Oppy a B+. I do feel like you don't have to be into space exploration to like it, but I'm certain you'll enjoy it if you are.