Mark Reviews Movies: GOOD NIGHT OPPY

Good Night Oppy, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 3, 2022

The story of two not-so-little robots that could, Good Night Oppy tries to frame a scientific tale as a personal one to mixed effect. Part of the problem is that science should matter much more here, but mostly, it's because director Ryan White tries to humanize a pair of robots in ways that even their makers seem think is a bit of a stretch.

It's not that the people who built and followed the Mars Exploration Rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, didn't develop some form of attachment to the five-foot-tall robots that spent years traversing, exploring, and examining the Martian surface. The NASA engineers in charge of the project didn't mean to build them to look somewhat cute, but when you're trying to replicate some kind of human activity or sense in a machine, it's going to have some human-like features.

The cameras attached to the long neck that extended from the base of the robots, for example, did start to look a bit like eyes. The whole point was for the cameras to have the equivalent of 20/20 vision, after all, so such a comparison is almost to be expected. They're kind of like people, but to think of them as the children of these engineers, for example, would be far too sentimental. Some of those designers and engineers even say as much, but White doesn't seem to care.

The robots become the stars of this documentary, which traces their design, construction, and mission to Mars, which began in 2003 and, for one of the rovers, continued until 2018. The mission was only supposed to last for 90 "sols," or a day on Mars (One of the unexpected challenges and more amusing anecdotes in the movie comes when team members explain how their daily schedule on Earth had to adjust to Mars time, resulting in a lot of sleepiness and essentially jet lag). Those robots kept going, though, well past their theoretical lifespan and all expectations, resulting in, well, some kind of results.

The movie is a bit hazy on that part. That's a mistake on the filmmaker's part, to be sure, because a movie about real-life discovery and exploration should give us a better sense of why we need to discover and explore more of the solar system and universe beyond our home.

Some of the people interviewed by White here became interested in space and Mars in particular because the mission of Spirit and Opportunity coincided with their formative years. One woman explains how she earned a trip to the mission control room for the day of the launch, and since then, she has wanted no other career than to work for NASA. That story repeats itself with other employees as the mission continues for years. A whole generation of NASA scientists grew up dreaming of working there, simply because of these two rovers, and for the last leg of the Opportunity's trek, they got to be part of the effort.

Those are great, inspiring, and heart-warming stories, and to White's credit, his documentary seems determined to do its part to create a whole new generation of ambitious dreamers and curious scientists. One can't—or at least shouldn't—fault the goal. As for the method of achieving it, that's a different story.

The narrative is a chronological telling of the rover missions, with the people involved in them explaining the general purpose of the robots, as well as some of the specific challenges they faced along the way. Some impressive visual effects re-create the rovers and the surface of Mars to give us some sense of scale, although the storytelling itself comes up short in that regard. During its lifespan, Spirit didn't cover the distance of a marathon, and it took over 11 years for Opportunity to actually traverse that distance. Years pass here in a flash of overlooked routine, as Angela Bassett narrates mission diaries to let us know some actual progress is being made.

White seems a bit too certain that the digital effects and imbuing the rovers with some kind of personality will make up for the lack of any real information about what the missions accomplished—either hard data or soft explanations. The rovers moved slowly and discovered some evidence that there might have been water on Mars. That's undeniably a big deal, although even the scientists and engineers in charge, while enthusiastic about the potential discovery, are sure to hedge it with the notions that the evidence isn't a guarantee, that even past water doesn't necessarily mean the previous existence of life there, and that there's still more to do.

Unsurprisingly, the human stories are far more intriguing and engaging, especially as different generations of NASA workers explain how and why they came into this field. Those stories, though, are so brief that, like the specifics of the mission's results and larger relevance, we're left wanting more.

Those are major issues for a movie that wants us to understand an unprecedented human endeavor. The robots may be impressive and, as they're portrayed here, endearing, but these scientists and engineers should be the real focus of Good Night Oppy, especially since the movie intentionally or accidentally serves as a recruitment tool for those roles in the future and as an attempt to inspire another generation to look to Mars and beyond.

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