Cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration, Ryan White’s Good Night Oppy turns NASA’s 2003 Mars Rover mission into the kind of uplifting story that could inspire many children to become scientists. In fact, one of the documentary’s more emotionally resonant beats comes when it highlights research scientist Abigail Fraeman, who visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) when she was 16 and witnessed the rovers Spirit and Opportunity land on Mars. She would go on to fulfill her dream by working on the same mission as an adult.
Eager to prove Mars once had water, and as such could sustain life, planetary scientist Steve Squyres convinced NASA to send two robots millions of miles away to find the evidence. Much of Good Night Oppy’s first quarter is taken up by the complexities of designing robots to survive being shot into space and crash-landing on the red planet. The initial tension comes from the need to hit a narrow launch window (what with optimal launch conditions to Mars only coming around every two years or so) and not wasting $1 billion in government money.
After that succeeds, the story then turns to whether the solar-powered Spirit and Opportunity can explore and transmit for their planned 90-day life cycle. The film then takes an unexpected turn as the rovers make it past the first three months and just keep running, leaving the scientists with an unusual but welcome problem: Where do we send them next?
Normally this kind of adventure narrative demands a plucky protagonist to use their wits and ingenuity to survive the harsh conditions of space or another planet. Since Good Night Oppy is about an unmanned mission, the drama is more earthbound. Some of the film’s emotional texture comes from the anxiety and excitement of the people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is located in Pasadena, California, watching the blurry images beaming back from Mars and maneuvering their robots around various challenges. Blake Neely’s heroic score and epic computer-generated scenery (horizon-spanning dust storms, vast seas of reddish dunes) from Industrial Light & Magic strain to boost The Martian-esque levels of drama.
The crux of White’s documentary, and its appeal to younger viewers in particular, though, is the anthropomorphizing of Spirit and Opportunity as avatars for the researchers who no doubt desperately want to be the ones on Mars, picking up rocks and peering into the planet’s miles-wide craters. Described by one scientist as “cute-looking,” they trundle along with a resolute determination, pivoting their camera-heads around and sticking out their arms to study the environment like something generated by Pixar for maximum endearment.
Angela Bassett’s rich narration of the rovers’ mission logs increases the feeling of their being less machines than vessels for the dreams of their creators. The film highlights the sense of the robots being on an adventure by scoring scenes of their explorations to the songs played by the JPL crew back at mission control. The playlist—B-52s’s “Roam,” Katrina and the Waves’s “Walking on Sunshine,” ABBA’s “S.O.S.” (for when they lose contact with one of the rovers)—leans into the charming dorkiness that undergirds much of the film’s appeal.
As the years go on and the inexplicably long-lived robots tackle one challenge after another—from surviving a harsh winter to getting stuck in a sand crater—they seem, at least to their human crew, to take on unique personalities. That makes it all the harder for the JPL scientists to accept when the rovers finally start to break down. Many of the scientists freely break down crying on camera, which, though clearly less about the shutting down of a machine and more about the years of work that they put into this project, is rather surprising in the moment.
That surprise may leave one with the impression that Good Night Oppy could have done a little more to explain the rationale behind the mission—namely beyond pure research. Without that, it can feel like a somewhat simplistic documentary that works too hard to create excitement and emotion around a somewhat narrow, technical story. At the same time, a story of technical innovation that doesn’t seem in any way to make the world a worse place feels well-timed.
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