Space Tourists
Melbourne International Film Festival, 26/07/2010
Status: Behind by 18 films
I sat through this documentary, but I’m still not sure I know what it was about. These are the things I know for certain:
- If you have 20 million dollars, you can hitch a ride on a Russian rocket heading to the International Space Station, as did an Iranian-American billionairess and the guy who designed Word and Excel for Microsoft.
- In Kazakhstan, one of the poorest countries on the planet, people use the scrap metal from the rockets as material for making tools and shelter. The metal comes from the parts of the rocket that are jettisoned after take of as the rocket gets out into space. They either run around the tundra for it, or collect it from their backyards.
- An award winning photographer has captured some beautiful images of these derelicts in the Kazak country-side, like the one above (also, he is currently reading Into The Wild which is probably not pertinent to the whole space theme, but took up a fair bit of screen time).
- There may or may not have been a point in the documentary about the amount of money space travel costs or perhaps about the gap between rich and poor, or possibly even about the power of following your dreams.
- There is nothing - and I mean NOTHING - good about early 90s style saxophone solos as featured (heavily) in the film’s score
Although covering interesting subject matter, the film meandered around with no sense of where it was heading. Also, the voice-over of whispered quotes from Russian literature were just plain confounding.
