Some people can pinpoint an exact moment that changed their lives forever. For Homer Hickman, it was watching the Russian rocket Sputnik race across the sky on a starry night in his small West Virginia mining town. Homer's life was never quite the same.
Like the other kids in Coalwood, Homer's future was pretty much mapped out for him before he was even born - graduate high school, work in the mines, get black lung and die before he hits 50. And because his father (Chris Cooper, Lone Star) ran the mines, Homer's inescapable fate seemed even more likely than most. That's why his friends and family were so surprised when Homer pursued his new rocketry hobby with such a fervent intensity.
With the singular goal of winning the National Science Fair (and the college scholarship attendant thereto), Homer spends all of his free time trying to launch a rocket high and straight into the sky. His father ignores him, his jock brother laughs, and his mother can only warn, `Don't blow yourself up,' in A Christmas Story fashion.
Well, he almost does blow himself up on his first attempt, so Homer drafts the school nerd, Quentin Wilson (Chris Owen), to help with the chemistry end of things. The next launch was a bit more successful, with the rocket becoming airborne, but also dangerously zipping through a crowd of workers at the mine.
Having been banished from further rocket experiments on company land – which pretty much made up the entire town of Coalwood – Homer and his friends hike eight miles to the outskirts of town to test their latest projectiles. Using money raised by selling parts of an unused railroad track, they build a launch pad and an observation shack to safely view the dangerous blasts and, with some help from the mine metal shop workers and their spunky teacher (Laura Dern), they begin to make real progress. And as their rockets grow in both size and intellect, so do their methods of detonation and the size of the crowds that initially gather to mock, but end up walking away slack-jawed and dumbfounded.
The boys are adorable and charismatic in a Teen Beat sort of way and, for all I know, could actually be members of the pop faves N-Sync. Homer (Jake Gyllenhaal) is more than believable as an everyday kid fighting the usual battles of the average teenager, but also sensibly mixes in the fear elicited by the mine's constant presence, a weight that is always hanging just above his head, ready to crush all of his hopes and dreams. Chris Cooper capably handles the role of the crusty, distant dad while Laura Dern's `follow your dreams' schoolteacher is just a throwaway role.
Director Joe Johnston's (Jumanji) use of the mine as a parallel of Hell is very effective in this heartwarming true tale of this small-town boy that eventually became a NASA employee. The script is well-paced and hits its only stumbling block when it throws in a mine union strike that has little to do with the overall plot. The closing credits include actual footage of the young boys and their later launch attempts, which helps to drive home the power of this story. But I couldn't help thinking, `What if it was cloudy that night when Sputnik sped by?'
http://home.eznet.net/~jpopick/
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews