Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, Donald Sutherland, James Cromwell, Loren Dean, Courtney B. Vance, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, William Devane, Marcia Gay Harden

- Reviewed by Tom

I have been looking forward to seeing Space Cowboys for a while and found it to be pretty decent.

I'll break it down by slices (see footnotes below!):

2 slices—for humor
1 slice—best airsickness vomiting scene ever!
2 slices—special effects from outside the spacecraft
1 slice—for being one of the more decent space movies in a while

The Russians have an old satellite that is falling out of orbit that they say is the last remaining communications satellite they have left and are desperate to get it fixed. How a satellite falls from a geosyncronous orbit without a big push from 22,000 miles out is beyond me, but it is just a movie! Of course the Russians had stolen the guidance system from NASA back in the days of Skylab and the only guy that can fix it is the old fart who built it (Clint Eastwood). So Clint and his old test pilot buddies are gathered together to fix it since they are the only ones that understand the old technology and they bribe NASA to let them take the flight (which they were cheated out of by a monkey).  Anyway, if I said much more about the plot it may spoil it (there are some interesting surprises that show up in the movie).

Pie details:

The movie had plenty of funny parts and old people jokes, and they only repeated one similar joke with the young pilots (the old and young were pretty competitive with each other). Cute monkey scene.

Yeah, it is kind of sick, but the funniest part of the movie was the airsickness scene—it was pretty messy. It reminded me of something that ALMOST happened with one of my student pilots once.

The special effects in the scenes from outside the spacecraft in orbit were some of the best done since Apollo 13. Obviously the cockpit scenes were done in a shuttle simulator, and had kind of the fake look, but the outside scenes were way cool!

I gave it one slice for being one of the better space movies in a while. Of course there were the unbelievable parts that didn't make much sense:

• How come they were so amazed to see the satellite for the first time? Didn't they train on a model of it?

• They didn't use a tether when they exited the shuttle and floated across the cargo bay of the shuttle.

• How did the satellite fall out of a very high orbit?

• The X-2 in the beginning was only a single seat plane, this one had 2 guys in it.

Oh well, it is just a movie, what can you expect!  I'm just a space geek!  :-)

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