Space Cowboys | Alexander Capital

Space Cowboys

Space Cowboys is a 2000 American adventure drama film directed and produced by Clint Eastwood. It stars Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner as four older \"ex-test pilots\" who are sent into space to repair an old Soviet satellite.

In 1958, two U.S. Air Force pilots and aspiring astronauts William \"Hawk\" Hawkins and Frank Corvin are testing a modified Bell X-2[4] when Hawk decides to break a height record. The plane stalls and they are forced to eject, narrowly missing a Boeing B-50 Superfortress flying with navigator \"Tank\" Sullivan. On the ground, Frank punches Hawk, but their fight is broken up by flight engineer Jerry O'Neill. Their boss, Bob Gerson chastises Hawk before taking them to a press conference, where he announces that the newly created NASA, rather than the USAF, will be conducting space flight tests.

The Space Shuttle Daedalus finds the satellite. It is not a communication satellite but in fact houses six nuclear missiles, relics from the Cold War and a violation of the Outer Space Treaty. Frank discovers that the satellite control system was stolen from Bob's files by the KGB, and that the satellite's computers will launch the missiles at predetermined targets if it falls out of orbit. NASA and the crew plan to use the payload-assist rockets to push the satellite into deep space. However, one of the younger astronauts, Ethan Glance, acting under Bob's original orders, tries to put the satellite into stable orbit himself. He sets off a chain reaction: the satellite collides with the shuttle, damaging most of the shuttle's computer systems and engines, destroying the solar panels on the satellite, and sending it into a faster decaying orbit, while Ethan is knocked out and dragged along with the satellite.

While Tank and Jerry tend to the other young astronaut Roger Hines, who suffered a concussion on the impact, Frank and Hawk space walk to the satellite in time to activate a booster rocket and slow the orbit's decay. As they see to Ethan, they realize that the only option is to have someone ride on the satellite as they fire the missiles' engines so that it escapes into deep space. Hawk, who was recently widowed and who has eight months to live from pancreatic cancer, sacrifices himself, hoping that he will be able to land on the Moon to fulfill his life's dream.

The guys who had the original right stuff get a second chance in \"Space Cowboys,\" 42 years after their Air Force experimental flights in the X-2 rocket plane were replaced by orbiting monkeys and something called \"astronauts.\" When NASA desperately needs expertise that only grizzled veteran Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood) can offer, he issues an ultimatum: His original team goes into space with him, or else.

\"I can't fill up a space shuttle with geriatrics!\" moans space program official Bob Gerson (James Cromwell). \"The clock's ticking, Bob,\" says Frank, \"and I'm only getting older.\" Eastwood has been having fun with his age for years. In \"Absolute Power\" (1997), accused of being a cat burglar, he tells the cops: \"Go down a rope in the middle of the night If I could do that, I'd be the star of my AARP meetings.\" The joke is that Eastwood, lean and mean, doesn't seem ready for retirement. And the old Air Force buddies and rivals he gathers for the space flight aren't old enough for the remake of \"Cocoon.\" Tommy Lee Jones, like Eastwood, is a plausible action star and will be for years. James Garner and Donald Sutherland are bald and graying here, but don't qualify as codgers. Like Eastwood's \"Unforgiven,\" about veteran Western tough guys, \"Space Cowboys\" tells a genre story where the heroes have come out of retirement for one last hurrah. As the film opens, a satellite from the former Soviet Union is falling toward Earth, and only an emergency mission can steer it back into orbit. The computer code on board is so ancient only one man can understand it: Eastwood, who wrote it in the first place. \"How did American code get on board a Soviet satellite in the middle of the Cold War\" Eastwood reasonably asks. The answer is obvious (they stole it), but there's another secret lurking in space that comes as a nasty surprise.

After the gathering comes a montage in which the men train and prepare--also obligatory in movies like this. Secret schemes are revealed. A love interest develops between Jones and Marcia Gay Harden, as a space agency functionary. We meet the gum-chewing mission director (William Devane). And there's one of those early scenes where a hero does something daring and tricky in practice, and we know with certainly that he will be required to do it again later in an emergency situation.

Great swatches of \"Space Cowboys\" are constructed, indeed, out of generic expectations. But the stuff in outer space is unexpected, the surprise waiting out there is genuine, and meanwhile, there's an abundance of charm and screen presence from the four veteran actors. There is a reason Eastwood, Garner, Sutherland and Jones have remained stars for so long, and the movie gives them all characteristic scenes. (Sutherland's ladies' man has a funny moment on the Jay Leno show--only a line of dialogue, but it has been well set up and gets a big laugh.) \"Space Cowboys\" lacks the urgency of a movie like \"The Right Stuff\"--it's too secure within its traditional story structure to make much seem at risk--but with the structure come the traditional pleasures as well. The actors know where the laughs and thrills are and respect them. Eastwood as director is as sure-handed as his mentors, Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. We leave the theater with grave doubts that the scene depicted in the final feel-good shot is even remotely possible, but what the hell; it makes us smile.

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One of the most challenging aspects of filming \"Space Cowboys\" was the heavy spacesuits that the principal actors had to wear. Jones' comments alone would probably discourage anyone from working at NASA.

\"The space suits were uncomfortable...They're painful to put on, painful to take off, painful to wear. And they have little air conditioners you have to carry around which are always breaking down, and lots of hoses that are always getting kinked. They're always biting or scratching or pinching you somewhere.\"

This betrayal was facilitated by Bob Gerson (played later in life by James Cromwell), a self-aggrandizing superior officer who negotiated himself a fast-track career at NASA out of the deal. Meanwhile, the Daedalus alumni have gone on to generally less glorious futures, each in some way reflecting their first love of speed and space: Frank became a rocket scientist, Hawk continued flying as a charter pilot, Jerry indulged his love of G-forces by designing roller coasters, and Tank reached for the heavens by taking up the cloth as a Baptist minister.

SPACE COWBOYS centers around four hot-dogging test pilots (Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland), who were thrown out of the space program and replaced by a monkey. Forty years later, they are called back into action when a Russian communications satellite begins to fall down out of the sky. It turns out that the satellite's guidance system is, mysteriously, none other than the very guidance system set up by former hot dog Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood). And it also turns out, mysteriously, that for unrevealed \"political\" reasons, NASA wants the satellite repaired, not destroyed. Less mysteriously, it also turns out that Corvin won't fix the thing unless NASA lets him go up and do it himself, accompanied by his old team, despite the fact that \\\"the last time they trained for a space program, people were driving cars with fins on them.\\\"

Director Eastwood takes his time, giving us a prolonged black and white intro, with the stars' voices coming from younger actors portraying them circa 1958. Then we have to get acquainted with the problem, NASA has to come to Corvin for help, he has to turn them down, then get his old nemesis to agree to let him get his over-the-hill-gang back together, then they have to go through training and show those young upstart astronauts a thing or two, and then comes ten, nine, eight, seven, and all the rest of it and we're out in space. The script is weak and saggy and the plot is predictable. The last scene is weirdly maudlin, even macabre.

The frontier promise and the approaching end. Probably the most mellow easygoing film Eastwood directed, yet it effortless pull more weight than one might at first expect. The space material is very good, there's a practical man on a mission quality to everything in the middle of all those old man's jokes and the cast works really well together right down to many of the smaller parts. And that final shot remains great.

Four top fighter pilots, now retired, are brought back into service to assist NASA during a major satellite crisis. Although their cocky, nonconformist attitudes kept the quartet out of the space program in the 1960s, their specialized know