I didn’t get to last night’s Mars movie screening (http://marsmovieguide.com/) until 8 p.m., just as the first movie, 1997’s RocketMan (that’s how the film’s imdb.com page spells its title), was getting under way. It was a pretty silly film, essentially an uncredited remake of Don Knotts’ vehicle The Reluctant Astronaut with admixtures of Jerry Lewis’s Way … Way Out (both films I’ve seen at previous screenings from this source) in which the dumb “comedian” (if, in Dwight MacDonald’s words, I may use the term for courtesy) was someone named Harland Williams. Aside from looking through much of the film like he’s auditioning for a biopic of Jerry Lewis, Williams is a decent-looking chap and one wonders whether, in a better script than the one Craig Mazin, Greg Erb and Stuart Gillard provided for him here (with one Stuart Gillard as director), he might actually be kinda-sorta funny once in a while. He plays a brilliant but wildly eccentric computer designer who ends up on a mission to Mars when the originally scheduled astronaut is scrubbed at the last minute and he has to win a competition with the far more qualified Gordon Peacock (Blake Boyd) for the slot on the crew. He does this by driving Peacock crazy in the 24-hour isolation chamber that’s part of NASA’s regimen to see how people can handle the closed environment and sheer loneliness of space travel.
Once we progress (in the manner of a disease) from the silly scenes based on NASA’s actual astronaut training (including the famous centrifuge, meant to simulate the effects of acceleration as gravity increases while the spacecraft reaches escape velocity, which of course Fred absolutely loves and insists on being taken to the max) to the even sillier scenes based on the spaceship itself — which is crewed by Fred (who suddenly realizes he needs to use the bathroom just as the rocket is about to launch; yep, it’s that sort of movie — and he also farts inside his spacesuit); Julie Ford (Jessica Lundy), who of course hates him at first sight and eventually falls in love with him; and “Wild Bill” Overbeck (William Sadler), as well as a chimpanzee named Ulysses (played by a chimp named Raven — of whom I couldn’t resist a Poe-themed joke: “Quoth the Raven: ‘My career is nevermore!’”) while their Mission Control guy is Bud Nesbitt (Beau Bridges, who once actually made good movies), who’s supposedly the guy who screwed up Apollo 13 — the gags continue stupidly until the astronauts actually land on Mars (shown as a series of red-filtered shots of the desert wilderness in Moab, Utah).
There a sudden Martian wind
storm kicks up and threatens their ability to relaunch their spacecraft and
return to Earth, and stupidly three of the four crew members (including the
chimp, whom Randall risks his own life to rescue — PETA would be proud!) go
outside in it to save each other’s lives before their ship makes it off Mars
and back to Earth. There are actually a few funny bits in RocketMan, including one in which Randall compares himself to
the Cowardly Lion and warbles a few bars of “If I Were King of the Forest”; a
scene in which Randall goes into the spacecraft’s toilet to rescue a gold medal
given him by the overall Mission Controller (he says it’s one of three and the
others he gave to Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell) and he ends up with his face
and right arm half-covered in blue goo just as the astronauts are supposed to
do a live simulcast with the President of the United States, who asks, “Why
does one of you look like a Smurf?”; and one in which Randall starts a worldwide
singalong of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” in various languages —
though the translations are hilariously inexact: in the “French” version he
sings “Je suis le papillon sur la table”, which means “I am the butterfly on
the table.” For the most part, however, this is one of those films which Dwight
Macdonald (again!) said that “in form and intent must be characterized as
comedies” but lack the seemingly key ingredient of actually being able to get
an audience to laugh.
