‘Good Night Oppy’ Review: Life (Kind of) on Mars

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/movies/good-night-oppy-review.html

By Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times

Excerpt: NASA’s Opportunity Rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and chugged along for more than 14 years before giving out. (In February 2019, NASA declared the mission over.) Opportunity’s anticipated time in service — a span that Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission, is heard likening in “Good Night Oppy” to a warranty — was only around 90 days. Oppy, and to a lesser extent its sister rover, Spirit, which “died” several years earlier, was the robot geologist that refused to quit. Neither rover, alas, shot cinematic-quality footage of the red planet, but in this documentary from Ryan White (“Assassins,” on the killing of Kim Jong-nam), visual effects work from Industrial Light & Magic allows viewers to imagine they’re exploring craters and bedrock right alongside the androids. ...the way “Good Night Oppy” anthropomorphizes the robots might sound like pure Hollywood hokum. (The movie, unusually for a documentary, is graced by the imprimatur of Amblin Entertainment.) But White, through interviews and archival footage, makes clear that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., couldn’t help but regard these bots as living things.


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