Dreyfuss does his best, but this lazy space drama fails to take off
Film Astronaut PG cert, 96min
Dir Shelagh Mcleod Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Krista Bridges, Lyriq Bent, Richie Lawrence, Colm Feore, Karen Leblanc
We already have a neat term for stories about young people crossing the threshold of adulthood – coming-of-age – but we’re rather more circumspect about the equivalent moment of reckoning that occurs somewhere down the far end of the track. Maybe we should call them taking-of-stock films, since they feature characters reflecting on the lives they’ve led so far, and pondering what comes next. Count among them Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kurosawa’s Ikiru, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and, perhaps most existentially scouring of all, Pixar’s Up.
In a purely box-ticking sense, Astronaut is a classic of the form. In every other, though, this early casualty of the current tumult (its mid-march cinema release was cancelled at the last minute) just ends up shuffling through the motions. It stars Richard Dreyfuss as Angus Stewart, a 75-year-old widower and amateur astronomer whose lifelong dream of space travel suddenly and tantalisingly comes within reach – just as his daughter (Krista Bridges) and son-in-law (Lyriq Bent) are about to move him into residential care. The first commercial space flight is about to go up – conveniently, from an airfield that seems to be just down the road – and the flinty, Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire behind it (Colm Feore) announces a national contest to give away the last available seat. Angus has a disqualifying heart condition, and is 10 years too old. But where there’s a will, plus a plucky grandson (Richie Lawrence) with access to apparently watertight fake IDS, there’s a way.
Dreyfuss’s very presence here nods towards the actor’s performance as the UFO obsessive Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind some 43 years ago. Angus, too, hears the siren call of the cosmos – a theme that was mind and soul-expanding in the hands of Steven Spielberg, but is considerably less so here.
Partly this is because the film tries to depict things far beyond the outer reaches of its obviously modest budget. The spaceport resembles a business park off the M25, while the climactic blast-off sequence, realised in bargain-basement CGI, gave rise to a sensation that I can only describe as the opposite of awe.
But more damagingly, the central stargazing character study has very little texture or progression to speak of, and first-time writer-director Shelagh Mcleod ends up using a formulaic race-against-time subplot – Angus, a former civil engineer, finds a potentially fatal flaw in the launch plans that no one else has spotted – to squeeze the drama into a recognisable narrative shape. We’re supposed to be moved by the old boy’s doggedness, and there are points at which Dreyfuss’s stoical screen presence almost gets us there. But for a film about the joy and value of expanding your horizons, whatever your age, its outlook is irksomely blinkered.