By Variety | Created at 2025-03-09 02:52:00 | Updated at 2025-03-09 15:22:33
14 hours ago
When I was four, my parents took me to a planetarium for the first time. It was a huge one, in Chicago; it seemed as big as space itself. I enjoyed many more visits to planetariums over the years, but none could ever match the experience I had when I was four. I looked up at that epic black domed sky and thought the stars and planets were real. I felt in sync with them, almost part of them, enthralled, immersed, and wonderstruck.
That’s the sensation I had watching “Starman.” It’s a documentary about space exploration that puts you in touch with your inner wide-eyed child. It’s the intergalactic meditation as blissed-out mind-bender. The film’s director, Robert Stone, made what I consider to be the single greatest documentary about the American space program — the six-hour-long “Chasing the Moon,” which was shown on PBS in 2019. It was a film that explored, with elegant majesty, how the world of NASA was built and why it was built (and that it was anything but inevitable). “Starman” could almost be that film’s shimmering sequel. As a director, Robert Stone is in touch with the primal power of space to stoke our dreams. He reconnects the audience to the true meaning of marvel — to behold with astonishment, a kind of incandescent curiosity. “Starman” peels away the layers of our cynicism to infuse us with the feeling we had when space held an awe that felt transporting.
In 1969, the moon landing hit America in a different way than I think people expected. The famous photograph known as “Earthrise,” taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve, 1968, showing the Earth as a kind of glowing half marble over the lunar horizon, had famously given humanity a new perspective on how small, and maybe vulnerable, our planet really was. That image is widely cited as having launched the environmental movement, and by the time Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, we were ready to be blown away by the change in perspective it offered. We had conquered the moon. Yet it was, for all that miraculousness…a rock. A giant slate-gray quarry of sand and rubble.
Once we knew that, once we saw it, once we’d done that, where was there left to go? America at large, following the moon landing, suffered a massive outer-space hangover/letdown, where it suddenly seemed as if we’d shot our wad of exploration, and we all somehow knew that nothing in the future would live up to it.
“Starman” reconnects us to that original cosmic rapture and wonders, quite rightly, how it could ever have gone away. The movie, full of extraordinary footage, returns us to that moment when the promise of space carried a spiritual thrust. It says that our desire to explore other worlds, and to find life on them, filled a religious hunger in us. But that we all kind of forgot that.
At the center of “Starman” is Gentry Lee, the film’s narrator, galactic tour guide, and principal subject. Lee, a NASA engineer and best-selling science-fiction author, was the director of mission planning during the Viking missions to Mars and also the chief engineer for the Galileo mission (which explored Jupiter and its moons), and he spends the entire movie talking directly at us (in a way that feels Errol Morris adjacent). At once elfin and volatile, with the mind of a science prodigy combined with a child-like zeal he still retains at 82, Lee, with his big innocent eyes, comes off like a cross between the Starchild and J.K. Simmons. He’s the starman of the title, a true believer back then who remains one today, and he’s a giddy and voluble and stoked personality, a man possessed by the promise of other worlds, a feeling he makes contagious.
In the ’70s, with America having demystified the moon, there was a massive push to explore Mars, a place that had long colonized our hopes and fears about what extraterrestrial life could be. We see clips of writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan (who became a celebrity, in part, because he seemed like an alien) dangling the prospect of extraterrestrial life as an all-too-real possibility. “Starman,” with Gentry Lee reigniting the fervor of those times, returns us to the reality-based daydream of life on other planets, and the question of how authentic that dream ever was. The film puts forth a fascinating thesis, illustrated with hundreds of light bulbs arranged on a concrete surface, which is that in a universe that likely contains a trillion planets, the prospect that some of them evolved the way Earth did is overwhelmingly large, but that it may be in the nature of advanced civilizations to die out. So the chances that several worlds of intelligent life existed simultaneously is drastically reduced.
Mars, its surface marked by canals, is a place where water might once have flowed, but once we got there with a robot camera it was revealed that the landscape, in its spectacular red-rock way, was as barren as the moon. But what of the other planets? The film includes extensive photos and video footage of the NASA teams of the ’70s and ’80s, with the younger Gentry Lee (sporting a long-haired combover that now looks otherworldly) at the center of it all. As these scientist-crusaders pushed on, they began to lead us toward worlds of far more majesty than Mars. When the film arrives at the Galileo images taken of Saturn and Jupiter, you may find yourself knocked back in your seat with amazement. Jupiter, with its mutating rainbow surface, looks like it could have been painted by Michelangelo (whose image “The Creation of Adam” is used by the film to suggest how far man has fallen away from God). And the planet’s moons are even more mysterious, the entire surface of Europa a shell of ice, with water flowing underneath. Where there is water, there could be life.
But as the film traces our century-long fear and desire to make contact with life from outer space, it does so with a winking acknowledgement of how much this fundamentally religious impulse — to find beings who would be to us as gods — brought a heady impulse of fantasy into the mix. Were the tales of alien abduction that became popular in the 1980s a kind of mass hallucination? That the folks who told these stories, starting with Barney and Betty Hill in 1961, clearly believed them tells us a great deal about the other world that exists in people’s heads. “Starman,” drawing on the deepest impulses of both science and science fiction, indulges our lust for alien revelation and also puts that feeling in its place, with the specter of climate change issuing its cosmic warning. For what the film ends up saying is that the other world we so desperately seek is actually all around us, if we could only open up our eyes to it. As Lee puts it at the end, “We live in paradise.” And paradise, like outer space, is the stuff of dreams.
