Netflix Minute: Space Cowboys

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.
My experience with Clint Eastwood is admittedly quite thin. While I'm sure I've seen at least a few titles in his catalog, the only one that's really stuck in my mind was Gran Torino. In that case, Eastwood directed with a very serious tone and gravity that only found a moment here and there for the reprieve of levity. In the case of Space Cowboys, levity is clearly one of the cornerstones of the movie.

The first half of the movie is steeped in humor. The banter between these old folks who seek one last hurrah in space is quite entertaining, using just the right amount of jokes about loss of vision, poor physical health, and needing to drink Ensure to "keep the libido up". This managed to sustain me throughout almost the whole movie, though the final scenes are decidedly worse with their absence.

The plot is driven by a Russian satellite that's in a degrading orbit over Earth, too large to be totally burned up through the atmosphere and too nebulously valuable to let go. Clint Eastwood's character, Frank Corbin, designed some of the key parts of the satellite and is thus instrumental in its repair due to the modern lack of understanding of outdated technology. Unfortunately, Corbin is blatantly estranged from the space program due to the fact that he was cut loose from early Air Force experiments in upper atmosphere flights, only to be replaced by a chimpanzee in the first space probe launch.

While these things make it easy to feel empathy for the central character, the paper-thin veil over the final "twist" and the lack of reinforcement for the stakes of the "Daedalus" mission ultimately detract from the serious moments in the third act of the film. Eastwood has no problem making the audience root for the characters, but the task at hand seems so contrived that it's difficult to believe that they'd be caught in such a ridiculous situation.

In addition to the weak elements of the plotline, Space Cowboys suffers from the CG effects of the early aughts without the budget of a behemoth like Armageddon. Maybe the spacewalking scenes were impressive at the movie's debut, but now they just seem somewhat unbelievable. For the sake of lasting in the annals of time, I wish that Eastwood and his crew would have opted for practical effects or simply toning down the "CG-ness" of the serious scenes.

Some of these complaints might seem damning to the score I'd like to give Space Cowboys, but I admittedly fell for the characters in the more humorous scenes of setup for the third act. The banter between Eastwood and Jones alone kept me wrapped up in the film until about halfway through, speaking to the quality of acting from these two veterans. If the writers simply gave the viewers a little more credit and constructed a plot that's not so contrived, I'm sure Space Cowboys would be something to remember. In its current state, the movie is just something that'll keep you entertained.