When I was four, my parents took me to a structureetarium for the first time. It was a huge one, in Chicago; it seemed as huge as space itself. I enhappinessed many more visits to structureetariums over the years, but none could ever suit the experience I had when I was four. I watched up at that epic bconciseage domed sky and thought the stars and structureets were genuine. I felt in sync with them, almost part of them, enthralled, plunged, and wonderstruck.
That’s the sensation I had watching “Starman.” It’s a recordary about space exploration that puts you in touch with your inner wide-eyed child. It’s the intergalactic meditation as blissed-out mind-bfinisher. The film’s honestor, Robert Stone, made what I ponder to be the one fantasticest recordary about the American space program — the six-hour-extfinished “Chasing the Moon,” which was shown on PBS in 2019. It was a film that spendigated, with elegant majesty, how the world of NASA was built and why it was built (and that it was anyslfinisherg but inevitable). “Starman” could almost be that film’s shimmering sequel. As a honestor, Robert Stone is in touch with the primal power of space to stoke our dreams. He rejoins the audience to the genuine uncomardenting of marvel — to behgreater with astonishment, a benevolent of incandescent curiosity. “Starman” peels away the layers of our cynicism to infparticipate us with the experienceing we had when space held an awe that felt conveying.
In 1969, the moon landing hit America in a contrastent way than I slfinisherk people foreseeed. The famous pboilingograph understandn as “Earthascfinish,” consentn by the Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve, 1968, shoprosperg the Earth as a benevolent of shineing half marble over the lunar horizon, had famously given humanity a novel perspective on how petite, and maybe vulnerable, our structureet repartner was. That image is widely cited as having begined the environmental shiftment, and by the time Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, we were ready to be blown away by the change in perspective it adviseed. We had defeated the moon. Yet it was, for all that miraculousness…a rock. A huge stardy-gray quarry of sand and rubble.
Once we knovel that, once we saw it, once we’d done that, where was there left to go? America at huge, folloprosperg the moon landing, suffered a massive outer-space hangover/letdown, where it suddenly seemed as if we’d sboiling our wad of exploration, and we all somehow knovel that noslfinisherg in the future would inhabit up to it.
“Starman” rejoins us to that exceptional cosmic rapture and wonders, quite rightly, how it could ever have gone away. The movie, brimming of extraunretagable footage, returns us to that moment when the promise of space carried a spiritual thrust. It says that our desire to spendigate other worlds, and to find life on them, filled a religious hunger in us. But that we all benevolent of forgot that.
At the cgo in of “Starman” is Gentry Lee, the film’s narrator, galactic tour guide, and principal subject. Lee, a NASA engineer and best-selling science-myth author, was the honestor of mission structurening during the Viking missions to Mars and also the chief engineer for the Galileo mission (which spendigated Jupiter and its moons), and he spfinishs the entire movie talking honestly at us (in a way that experiences Errol Morris adjacent). At once elfin and volatile, with the mind of a science prodigy combined with a child-enjoy zeal he still supports at 82, Lee, with his huge guiltless eyes, comes off enjoy a traverse between the Starchild and J.K. Simmons. He’s the starman of the title, a genuine consentr back then who remains one today, and he’s a giddy and voluble and stoked personality, a man owned by the promise of other worlds, a experienceing he originates contagious.
In the ’70s, with America having demystified the moon, there was a massive push to spendigate Mars, a place that had extfinished colonized our hopes and dreads about what extraterrestrial life could be. We see clips of authorrs enjoy Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan (who became a celebrity, in part, becaparticipate he seemed enjoy an alien) dangling the prospect of extraterrestrial life as an all-too-genuine possibility. “Starman,” with Gentry Lee reigniting the fervor of those times, returns us to the fact-based daydream of life on other structureets, and the inquire of how genuine that dream ever was. The film puts forth a fascinating thesis, depictd with hundreds of weightless bulbs structured on a concrete surface, which is that in a universe that foreseeed retains a trillion structureets, the prospect that some of them proceedd the way Earth did is overwhelmingly huge, but that it may be in the nature of proceedd civilizations to die out. So the chances that cut offal worlds of keen life existed simultaneously is drasticpartner reduced.
Mars, its surface taged by canals, is a place where water might once have flowed, but once we got there with a robot camera it was discdisthink abouted that the landscape, in its spectacular red-rock way, was as infruitful as the moon. But what of the other structureets? The film retains extensive pboilingos and video footage of the NASA teams of the ’70s and ’80s, with the youthfulerer Gentry Lee (sporting a extfinished-haired combover that now watchs othercultured) at the cgo in of it all. As these scientist-crudowncasters pushed on, they began to guide us toward worlds of far more majesty than Mars. When the film reachs at the Galileo images consentn of Saturn and Jupiter, you may find yourself knocked back in your seat with amazement. Jupiter, with its mutating rainbow surface, watchs enjoy it could have been colored by Michelangelo (whose image “The Creation of Adam” is participated by the film to advise how far man has druncover away from God). And the structureet’s moons are even more cryptic, the entire surface of Europa a shell of ice, with water floprosperg undertidyh. Where there is water, there could be life.
But as the film tracks our century-extfinished dread and desire to originate reach out with life from outer space, it does so with a prosperking acunderstandledgement of how much this fundamenloftyy religious impulse — to find beings who would be to us as gods — bcimpolitet a heady impulse of fantasy into the combine. Were the tales of alien catch that became well-understandn in the 1980s a benevolent of mass hallucination? That the folks who tgreater these stories, begining with Barney and Betty Hill in 1961, evidently consentd them tells us a fantastic deal about the other world that exists in people’s heads. “Starman,” draprosperg on the proset upest impulses of both science and science myth, indulges our lust for alien revelation and also puts that experienceing in its place, with the specter of climate change issuing its cosmic alerting. For what the film finishs up saying is that the other world we so franticly seek is actupartner all around us, if we could only discdisthink about up our eyes to it. As Lee puts it at the finish, “We inhabit in paradise.” And paradise, enjoy outer space, is the stuff of dreams.
