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Director:
Joe Johnston
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern
Running Time: 107 minutes
Original UK Release: December 1999
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By the
end of the 1990s, the pre-Donnie Darko Jake Gyllenhaal was
pretty much unknown. He'd cropped up in City Slickers as a
child actor and appeared in a couple of forgettable flicks,
but it was October Sky which really announced his arrival.
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Ironically,
this true story about four boys who battle against the
odds to build and launch their own miniature rockets
largely failed to get off the ground when it was released.
Shame really. Because it's really rather good.
Based on the book Rocket Boys, the action is set in
West Virginia in 1957 and follows the hopes and dreams
of the book's author, Homer Hickam (Gyllenhaal), one
of the residents of Coalwood, whose future has been
pretty much pre-ordained.
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Like all
the other young men in town, he's going to end up working
down the mine, until he watches the Soviet-launched Sputnik
satellite zoom across the October sky one night and begins
to have other ideas, ideas which could prove to be his ticket
to a better life.
Enlisting
the help of three school friends (the charmer, the geek and
the wide-boy) he begins building and launching rockets, a
hair-brained scheme which starts with them blowing up a garden
fence, but which soon begins to attract attention.
Inspired
by teacher Laura Dern (who obtains an advanced rocket book
for them) and with help from a number of unexpected sources,
numerous failed attempts are soon forgotten as their creations
begin to fly higher and truer and the quartet become local
celebrities. Not only that, but the chance of entering a state
science fair (which promises scholarships for all four) also
falls into their laps.
But while
the sky may be the limit for Homer and his pals, his home
life is not so promising. His volatile relationship with his
disapproving mine superintendent father (Chris Cooper) threatens
to scupper his dreams. So when one of Homer's rockets narrowly
misses some of Cooper's men at the mine, it's not only the
explosives that go ballistic.
Constantly
at odds with a dad who wants to see him follow in his own
footsteps (a clash which provides the movie with its main
dramatic core), Homer also has to put up with the success
of his older brother, who has won a football scholarship and
is clearly flavour of the decade with Cooper.
Shot with an impressive sense of time and place by director
of photography Fred Murphy and sensitively handled by Johnson,
this is an enjoyable and uplifting movie which is at its most
entertaining when the four friends are experimenting with
their various designs and exploding their way to unlikely
success. They build a special shelter on a hill just outside
town and their launches soon attract huge crowds, until more
trouble strikes when one of their missiles is blamed for starting
a forest fire.
Ultimately,
their antics carry the hopes of the whole close-knit community,
offering a tiny spark of light in an otherwise dreary existence,
and Johnston charts their efforts with a balanced sense of
the dramatic and the fairytale.
There are minor quibbles, a back story involving a miners'
strike is poorly dealt with and Dern is perhaps underused,
but the performances are uniformly excellent, particularly
from Gyllenhaal and Cooper. They are both men with a passion,
but for different things, and the intensity they bring to
their roles is riveting.
An atypical
coming-of-age drama, this is stirring stuff. OK it's a bit
of a flag-waver, but films of this quality, and watchable
ones at that, don't come along too often.
There's
even a nice touch at the end when the real-life Homer Hickam
(who became a NASA scientist) and his rocketing pals are revealed,
accompanied by old home movie footage.
David
Lichtneker
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