This movie generated some pretty negative vibes even before its release, and I myself was caught up in that - the trailer looked absolutely awful, with its hackneyed drama and Natalie Portman's ridiculous sounding southern drawl. The fact that it was based on a real-life story somehow made it seem worse, as if the film was exploiting an actual astronaut who'd suffered a mental breakdown.
I ended up watching it on the plane - twice. It's one of those situations where you've got nothing to lose, so heck, let's see if it's as bad as it looked. (The second time, on the return trip, I wanted to confirm my reaction or see if I'd had one too many tiny bottles of vodka the first time around.) And guess what? It's not! It's really not! It is, in fact, pretty good, especially if you're already a fan of Portman and Jon Hamm and you like movies about space and our place in it (which this indirectly is, or tries to be).
For one thing, it's much more sympathetic to the real-life Lisa Nowak (whose name is oddly changed to Lucy Cola in the film) than the marketing made it seem. It's far from exploitative, but neither is it an exoneration - it is simply an explanation, and that's about the best anyone could have done with this story. Lucy is someone that a lot of stuff happens to - more than most people - and it all makes her question who she is and what she's doing here. But her actions at the end of the film - the infamous act that made national headlines - are left open-ended in terms of her true motivation and what she was really trying to do.
It is a strange film in that it starts very weakly, and it probably lost about half the audience within the first couple scenes. The first scene feels like a complete ripoff of Gravity's opening, minus the excitement. Then Portman's drawl kicks in, which is just jarring at first - though as the film goes on, I began to realize it was really my expectations that were the problem rather than her performance. (You just don't expect her to sound like that.) In fact, she's quite good throughout the film; her performance builds, and you start to notice all the little things she's doing. Facial expressions, nervous tics, etc.
Lots of people have made jokes about the movie omitting the diapers from the final scene. Know why they did that? Because it didn't happen. It was made up by the media. No doubt, so were a lot of other things in this movie for dramatic effect, so what's one more, right? But that would have pushed the film over the edge into exploitation and rumor-mongering, and maybe even slander. (The film outright claims in a title card to be based on true events; it's not pretending to be fictional.) I was actually glad that they omitted that little factoid.
The film does have its share of flaws, the biggest being that it's ponderous at times, and it has a sense of self-importance that it doesn't really deserve. It is at heart a family drama that happens to involve an astronaut, and that's what makes it interesting and different. But it tries hard at various points to make the story bigger than it is - it's a systemic NASA issue, it's sexism, it's something that changes inside everyone when they see how small and insignificant humanity is, and she just couldn't handle it. All of these things probably played some role for the real Lisa Nowak, but the bottom line is that she was just a person who was an astronaut who had a breakdown. If the film had stayed a little more down to earth and personal, it would have done better. But it's still worth watching, and it doesn't deserve the hate it's gotten.
I ended up watching it on the plane - twice. It's one of those situations where you've got nothing to lose, so heck, let's see if it's as bad as it looked. (The second time, on the return trip, I wanted to confirm my reaction or see if I'd had one too many tiny bottles of vodka the first time around.) And guess what? It's not! It's really not! It is, in fact, pretty good, especially if you're already a fan of Portman and Jon Hamm and you like movies about space and our place in it (which this indirectly is, or tries to be).
For one thing, it's much more sympathetic to the real-life Lisa Nowak (whose name is oddly changed to Lucy Cola in the film) than the marketing made it seem. It's far from exploitative, but neither is it an exoneration - it is simply an explanation, and that's about the best anyone could have done with this story. Lucy is someone that a lot of stuff happens to - more than most people - and it all makes her question who she is and what she's doing here. But her actions at the end of the film - the infamous act that made national headlines - are left open-ended in terms of her true motivation and what she was really trying to do.
It is a strange film in that it starts very weakly, and it probably lost about half the audience within the first couple scenes. The first scene feels like a complete ripoff of Gravity's opening, minus the excitement. Then Portman's drawl kicks in, which is just jarring at first - though as the film goes on, I began to realize it was really my expectations that were the problem rather than her performance. (You just don't expect her to sound like that.) In fact, she's quite good throughout the film; her performance builds, and you start to notice all the little things she's doing. Facial expressions, nervous tics, etc.
Lots of people have made jokes about the movie omitting the diapers from the final scene. Know why they did that? Because it didn't happen. It was made up by the media. No doubt, so were a lot of other things in this movie for dramatic effect, so what's one more, right? But that would have pushed the film over the edge into exploitation and rumor-mongering, and maybe even slander. (The film outright claims in a title card to be based on true events; it's not pretending to be fictional.) I was actually glad that they omitted that little factoid.
The film does have its share of flaws, the biggest being that it's ponderous at times, and it has a sense of self-importance that it doesn't really deserve. It is at heart a family drama that happens to involve an astronaut, and that's what makes it interesting and different. But it tries hard at various points to make the story bigger than it is - it's a systemic NASA issue, it's sexism, it's something that changes inside everyone when they see how small and insignificant humanity is, and she just couldn't handle it. All of these things probably played some role for the real Lisa Nowak, but the bottom line is that she was just a person who was an astronaut who had a breakdown. If the film had stayed a little more down to earth and personal, it would have done better. But it's still worth watching, and it doesn't deserve the hate it's gotten.