Sophia Michaels
Amazon’s thin but pleasant new documentary Good Night Oppy (which gets a limited theatrical release and a streaming release on Amazon Prime on Nov. 23) is about Spirit and Opportunity — the Mars Exploration Rovers that were launched into space in 2003 — and their makers. Opportunity is the star. The rovers were designed to last a little over 90 Earth days on the Red Planet. But they both outdid themselves, with Spirit persisting until it ceased communication in 2010 and Opportunity lasting for a staggering 5,111 sols (or Mars days) after landing — about 14 years.
It’s hard not to be taken with this — it feels like it means something. One of the more curious elements of Good Night Oppy is the NASA team’s tendency to anthropomorphize their machines, likening their initial bits of progress to baby’s first steps and their own roles as designers and keepers of these pioneering inventions to a kind of parenthood. But you can see why. It isn’t just their eye-like cameras, their five-foot-two-inch height (purposely meant to evoke the average height of humans) or the bundles of technical quirks that nearly amount to a personality. It’s the fact that they’re such a willing proxy of our own desire to explore, our curiosity and ability to problem-solve, our inextinguishable desire to exist and persist. The scientists who labored to make these machines know that this is the closest they will get to putting themselves up there. So you can understand the emotion when it’s lights-out for first Spirit, then Opportunity. It isn’t despite the fact that they way outlived their shelf lives, but because of it. The rovers weren’t our children. They were pieces of ourselves, up there.
Good Night Oppy, directed by Ryan White and narrated by Angela Bassett, gives us a swift history of the Mars Exploration Rover program’s efforts, intentions, and hard work as told by the charismatic scientists who watched it happen. For the scientists, we’re told, this new project was something of a chance at redemption. The Mars Climate Orbiter mishap back in 1999 — a $125 million error that came down to being confused over metric units — had given the scientists something to prove, understandably. In place of that catastrophe, we get a story about competence, about people who designed these new machines so well that even when unexpected problems befall them (which happens often), they and their machines — designed to think for themselves — could always work through it. We move forward through this story coasting on the highs and lows of every new obstacle and its ingenious solution, from solar flares that necessitate rebooting the rovers before they even reach Mars to the question of how to move down the steep walls of a crater. At one point, Opportunity literally digs its own seeming grave; at another, Spirit shows its moxie by avoiding a disastrous collision with only centimeters to spare.
The movie is big on the humanity of it all. The endearing semi-humanness of the machines, but also the stories of the people involved, with their daily “wake-up song” rituals and their odd work cycles, tailored to Mars time. The movie is practically a companion piece for the Matt Damon movie The Martian; they share a bright outlook, a problem solver’s delight at the labor of thinking through it all. If anything, Good Night Oppy could be nerdier, a little more in the weeds of the science that makes all of this possible. That’d prove a little less lightly entertaining, for some. But it’d also be true to what the movie is already about. Good Night Oppy sees the miracles of these missions as a matter of what happened after the rovers landed on Mars. In truth, the miracles started long before, right back here, on the planet we call home.
