105 min | PG | November 4, 2022 | Amazon Studios
A golf-cart-sized robot lands on Mars for a 90-day mission and keeps working for fifteen years. The engineers who built it talk about it like a family member, and the film wants you to feel the same way. It mostly gets there.
A rover the size of a golf cart lands on Mars in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 days. Opportunity works for fifteen years. Ryan White builds his documentary around the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who designed the rover, drove it, and watched it die. The film is about the relationship between people and a machine they refuse to treat as a machine. It argues that anthropomorphism is not a weakness in the scientists but the source of their endurance.
The film runs on the JPL team telling their own story. Steve Squyres, the mission’s lead scientist, talks about the rover with the affection of a parent describing a stubborn child. Jennifer Trosper and Rob Manning walk through the engineering crises with the precision of people who lived inside them. Abigail Fraeman joins the project as an intern and grows up alongside the mission, and her arc gives the film its clearest sense of time passing. Angela Bassett narrates from the rover’s perspective, and the choice tilts the material toward sentiment rather than analysis.
White and co-writer Helen Kearns lean hard on Industrial Light and Magic to put the audience on Mars. The photoreal renderings of Opportunity crossing dunes and climbing crater rims are built from actual terrain data the rover collected. White cuts between these animations and the faces of the engineers in mission control, so the machine and its makers occupy the same emotional frame. The score pushes the awe to the surface and never lets a quiet moment stay quiet. The technique is effective and the seams rarely show.
The film succeeds at what it sets out to do and declines to do anything harder. It wants you to cry when a solar-powered robot loses the sun, and it earns that response through accumulation rather than manipulation. It has no interest in the politics of planetary science funding or the harder questions about what the mission actually proved. White made a tribute, not an investigation. As a tribute it is sincere, well-built, and a little too eager to tell you how to feel.