Make sure you have a tissue ready for ‘Good Night Oppy’

When Good Night Oppy, which follows Nasa rovers Opportunity and Spirit’s journey on Mars, launched at a film festival in September, the documentary had an unexpected effect on its audiences: they cried.

“It’s funny because I promise you we were not having conversations in the edit room on how we would make people cry,” director Ryan White said. “The resounding response to this film seems to be people coming up sheepishly with their hand over their mouth saying ‘I cried about a robot’.”

The film, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in September, looks at the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, which Nasa launched in 2003.

Both rovers, which were solar powered, were expected to live for only 90 Martian solar days (SOLS) but Opportunity (or Oppy) lasted over 14 years until it transmitted its last message on June 10 2018.

White wanted to make the film after Opportunity’s last message “My battery is low and it’s getting dark” went viral.

However the film’s human characters evoke an emotional response too.

White had assumed scientists and engineers would be academic and unemotional, posing a filmmaking challenge. “I was totally wrong. Once we met the human being characters, it was an embarrassment of riches.

These are people getting to do the things that we all dreamed about doing as just work to them. kids’ It s ... their it’s life. not It’s their daughter on Mars, as a lot of them see her.”

One of the major comparisons made by filmgoers is that the rovers look uncannily like the Pixar Studios animation character “Wall-e.”

That movie came out in 2008, after the rover landings.

“I think the comparisons are inevitable when we’re making a doc about a little robot alone on a planet,” White said. “There’s just something so endearing emotionally to that idea.”

Good Night Oppy begins streaming on Amazon on Wednesday.