Blockbuster History: Astronauts
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: infamously, Lightyear is a film based on a different film that never existed but inspired a toy that was first seen in a wholly unrelated film. Since this insanely terrible idea has never been used before and will (in a just world) never be used again, I've decided to just go with a light drama adventure about a bunch of comically unlikely space adventurers from around the late '90s.
I do not know if 2000's Space Cowboys is specifically the most out of character concept for a Clint Eastwood movie, nor if it is specifically the goofiest scenario he ever touched. In the former category we have the soppy hippie romance Breezy from 1973, and the glum, clattering 2014 adaptation of the musical Jersey Boys; in the latter category, we have the 1982 Firefox, a spy movie about an invisible jet. The competition is there on both fronts. Regardless, Space Cowboys is undeniably one of the what-the-fuck-est movies Eastwood ever starred in or directed, a bizarre, ludicrous fantasy played more or less entirely straight by the director-star and just about everyone else involved. It presents, without any notion that we're meant to find it more than tolerably ridiculous, a story about how NASA can't train any of its current astronauts how to use decades-old computers, so in order to prevent a satellite from crashing, they have to - aw, darn it - send a bunch of 70-year-old men into space.
What puts this over (or what fails to, if you're inclined to be harder on the movie than myself; either way, it's unambiguously the film's chief strength and the strategy it's betting 100% of its success) are the actors playing those for men: 72-year-old James Garner as "Tank" Sullivan, 70-year-old Eastwood as Frank Corvin, 65-year-old Donald Sutherland as Jerry O'Neill, and bring up the rear, incongruous baby-faced 53-year-old Tommy Lee Jones as "Hawk Hawkins", making the only time in his career that Jones wasn't nearly weathered and leathery enough to convincingly pull off a role. To be fair, he has an old soul, and plays Hawk with a sufficient amount weariness that you kind of believe he's in the same generational cohort as the rest of the cast (to keep being fair, he wasn't the first choice for the part).
Now, there's no specific reason for these exact four men to be all shaken up together. In general terms, if you're the sort of person who's a big James Garner fan, you're probably a big Clint Eastwood fan; the reverse, I suspect, isn't quite as true, but there's an affinity there. Sutherland kind of had a parallel career to Eastwood in the '70s (they had even co-starred in 1970's Kelly's Heroes), though not really thereafter. Jones is the oddest man out, though he'd start to follow an Eastwoodian career path after this, especially with his turn towards neo-Westerns in the late 2000s. The point being, it's not like there's a "together at last!" thing going on, as with e.g. De Niro and Pacino in Heat, nor a "they're finally back together!" thing, as with e.g. Lemmon and Matthau in Grumpy Old Men. There's just four old fellas, all of whom have some quantity of marquee value (I imagine Jones had the most at that exact moment, three years after Men in Black), and a shared ability to smirk in a way that feels somewhat more warm and ingratiating than smug and off-putting, so we get the feeling that they're sharing a private joke with us as we join them in not taking things too seriously, we're all just here to have a good time and joke around and be buddies.
That's perhaps why Space Cowboys can get away with its very weird tone, taking a ludicrous premise simultaneously at face value and also not very seriously. To dig into a bit more: in 1958, the four guys (played by young guys overdubbed by the older actors; it's creepy and strange, but not honestly any creepier nor stranger than modern digital de-aging techniques), but mostly Frank and Hawk, were U.S. Air Force pilots who were on the fast track to join the not-yet-created astronaut corps, but they were also rules-flaunting braggarts who got on the wrong side of Air Force brass, in the form of Bob Gerson (James Cromwell), and never made it into the space program once the newly-created NASA took the reins from the military. 42 years later, Gerson is still at NASA, which has just been tasked with a very odd mission: an old Soviet communications satellite that "just so happens" to have tech in it that Frank designed in his post-pilot life is coming down. And while ordinarily, satellites are just allowed to burn up, the Russians, in the body of General Vostov (Rade Šerbedžija), are incredibly eager to make sure that doesn't happen, for reasons that clearly aren't nefarious, certainly not because they have a whopping great number of nuclear armaments on the satellite that will create untold devastation if they hit the atmosphere. At any rate, NASA is tasked with cleaning up the mission, and Frank, brought on as a consultant, decides to strong-arm Gerson: he'll only help if he and his buddies finally get to go on a space mission. Gerson agrees, but only if Frank and company can haul their geriatric asses through astronaut training and pass all of the medical tests.
There's a vague "the Cold War ain't done with us" subtext to Space Cowboys that sort of lines this up as a latter-day reflection on Eastwood's Firefox days, much like all of his post-'90s work is a reflection on something he did in his superstar heyday, though this is in part an accident: the first version of Ken Kaufman & Howard Klausner's script had the mission to fix an actual NASA sateillite, but the filmmakers couldn't secure support from NASA without removing the implication that the space agency was in the habit of dumping weapons into orbit and lying about it. And it certainly would all flow better and just generally make more sense - insofar as this scenario was ever going to make a significant amount of sense - without the complication of having Russia involved, but at the same time, Space Cowboys generally seems to view the actual stakes of its story as an imposition, and that would, I imagine, be no less true of a NASA-based threat.
No, the film cares about its four old men, whose journey through basic training is treated as the subject of warm-hearted character comedy. Eastwood rarely starred in comedies, and they're rarer still in his directorial canon, so it's not a huge surprise that Space Cowboys is rarely a laugh-out-loud riot; mostly, it's just putting its characters in awkward situations and letting them grin and quip their way out. This could easily be deadly, a lot of insincere kitsch that viewed itself as trash and its audience as rubes, and insofar as that doesn't happen, it's for two main reasons. The cast is obviously one of these: these are four immensely charismatic actors, and they're surrounded by actors qualified enough to give them some actual human forces to interact with, rather than just situations (besides Cromwell, Marcia Gay Harden and William Devane are the headliners in the supporting ensemble). The script is quite flat and lifeless, with some pretty rough dialogue that had to over-explain a lot (it has to give us an exposition dump at the start, and then again midway through), and it gives the leads extremely bland personalities: Tank, who has since become a Baptist preacher, is the only one of the four who isn't a full-on cliché, and Frank and Hawk are even the same cliché. I will not say that they skate through this all unscathed: Eastwood for his part, completely fucks up an early scene when he's meant to discover to his dread that Gerson is still at NASA, and the painfully leading dialogue feels awkward and alien in the actor's mouth; I am tempted to say it's the single worst scene of his entire career.
But they skate through it with only a few bumps and bruises, shall we say, redeeming some very hoary situations and absolutely implausible narrative developments (including a romantic subplot for Jones that the film seems positively mortified to include) with the big effortless charm of old-school movie stars. The bulk of the first hour that's basically just sitcom humor feels agreeably underplayed and natural in their hands, and this gets me to the other main reason this works: Eastwood's directing is wonderfully casual. He's not a comedy director, as I said, which happily means that he's not directing this as a comedy; the rhythms aren't leading up to punchlines, he's not overstressing jokey dialogue. It's his typical naturalistic style, but in the absence of the severe dramatic narratives he generally favored, that naturalism ends up feeling shaggy and lively in ways that make Space Cowboys much, much more amiable and friendly than it probably ought to be.
This all carries us through the first 70-ish minutes of a 130 minute film, and then the filmmakers can't put it off any more: the four old guys have to end up in space, and then there has to be space-related thrills and suspense. And this is actually where things get weird. When it's just hanging out on the ground, letting the actors fuck around, it's a good fit for the laconic energy everybody is bringing to the table, enough so that it all feels very thoughtfully put together. When it's an effects-driven summertime popcorn movie (with effects by Industrial Light & Magic, no less, at a time in the industry when that was still a pretty big deal and meant you wanted to have your effects taken seriously), it gets kind of... stupid. Eastwood might not be much of a comedy director, but he's absolutely no kind of special effects director at all, and the spectacular elements of Space Cowboy in its second half end up feeling very awkwardly spliced in with the actors looking very serious and concerned. It's kind of a bummer, and it's nearly half of the film's running time; Eastwood and Garner also seem palpably uncertain what they should be doing now, though Jones and especially Sutherland keep a handle on the slack energy that was so delightful to watch prior to this.
The result is still, on balance, a watchable lark if you're a fan of the actors, and I imagine it's a deadly, idiotic bore if your're not. But I imagine it was already that way long before it went into space. Basically, this is Eastwood's hangout movie, a chance to get himself and three other actors he knew he could trust to treat this all as a romp with no real sense of danger, and also a distinct sense of pride in having gotten old without being decrepit. Space Cowboys is a bit of a victory lap for the actors as much as the characters, a chance to show off that they can still sparkle and twinkle like any younger, bright star in the Hollywood firmament. And they can, is the thing, so even if this is ultimately a bit of a trivial bauble, it never feels entirely empty. It's still pretty low on the list of Eastwood's late-career triumphs (which didn't stop the Cahiers du Cinéma critics from putting it on their year-end top 10, in possibly the most blatant "whatever, we adore Clint" gesture in that publication's ongoing love affair with the director), but it's also one of the most limber films he ever directed, letting his cast stretch languidly into their roles at a relaxed pace. It's just plain watchable, with none of the severity of the director's greatest films and none of the stiff sloppiness of his worst films. It's kind of hokey and corny, but it also doesn't care about impressing anybody who uses "hokey" and "corny" as insults, and so it's just a nice time, nothing more, and happily, nothing less.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
I do not know if 2000's Space Cowboys is specifically the most out of character concept for a Clint Eastwood movie, nor if it is specifically the goofiest scenario he ever touched. In the former category we have the soppy hippie romance Breezy from 1973, and the glum, clattering 2014 adaptation of the musical Jersey Boys; in the latter category, we have the 1982 Firefox, a spy movie about an invisible jet. The competition is there on both fronts. Regardless, Space Cowboys is undeniably one of the what-the-fuck-est movies Eastwood ever starred in or directed, a bizarre, ludicrous fantasy played more or less entirely straight by the director-star and just about everyone else involved. It presents, without any notion that we're meant to find it more than tolerably ridiculous, a story about how NASA can't train any of its current astronauts how to use decades-old computers, so in order to prevent a satellite from crashing, they have to - aw, darn it - send a bunch of 70-year-old men into space.
What puts this over (or what fails to, if you're inclined to be harder on the movie than myself; either way, it's unambiguously the film's chief strength and the strategy it's betting 100% of its success) are the actors playing those for men: 72-year-old James Garner as "Tank" Sullivan, 70-year-old Eastwood as Frank Corvin, 65-year-old Donald Sutherland as Jerry O'Neill, and bring up the rear, incongruous baby-faced 53-year-old Tommy Lee Jones as "Hawk Hawkins", making the only time in his career that Jones wasn't nearly weathered and leathery enough to convincingly pull off a role. To be fair, he has an old soul, and plays Hawk with a sufficient amount weariness that you kind of believe he's in the same generational cohort as the rest of the cast (to keep being fair, he wasn't the first choice for the part).
Now, there's no specific reason for these exact four men to be all shaken up together. In general terms, if you're the sort of person who's a big James Garner fan, you're probably a big Clint Eastwood fan; the reverse, I suspect, isn't quite as true, but there's an affinity there. Sutherland kind of had a parallel career to Eastwood in the '70s (they had even co-starred in 1970's Kelly's Heroes), though not really thereafter. Jones is the oddest man out, though he'd start to follow an Eastwoodian career path after this, especially with his turn towards neo-Westerns in the late 2000s. The point being, it's not like there's a "together at last!" thing going on, as with e.g. De Niro and Pacino in Heat, nor a "they're finally back together!" thing, as with e.g. Lemmon and Matthau in Grumpy Old Men. There's just four old fellas, all of whom have some quantity of marquee value (I imagine Jones had the most at that exact moment, three years after Men in Black), and a shared ability to smirk in a way that feels somewhat more warm and ingratiating than smug and off-putting, so we get the feeling that they're sharing a private joke with us as we join them in not taking things too seriously, we're all just here to have a good time and joke around and be buddies.
That's perhaps why Space Cowboys can get away with its very weird tone, taking a ludicrous premise simultaneously at face value and also not very seriously. To dig into a bit more: in 1958, the four guys (played by young guys overdubbed by the older actors; it's creepy and strange, but not honestly any creepier nor stranger than modern digital de-aging techniques), but mostly Frank and Hawk, were U.S. Air Force pilots who were on the fast track to join the not-yet-created astronaut corps, but they were also rules-flaunting braggarts who got on the wrong side of Air Force brass, in the form of Bob Gerson (James Cromwell), and never made it into the space program once the newly-created NASA took the reins from the military. 42 years later, Gerson is still at NASA, which has just been tasked with a very odd mission: an old Soviet communications satellite that "just so happens" to have tech in it that Frank designed in his post-pilot life is coming down. And while ordinarily, satellites are just allowed to burn up, the Russians, in the body of General Vostov (Rade Šerbedžija), are incredibly eager to make sure that doesn't happen, for reasons that clearly aren't nefarious, certainly not because they have a whopping great number of nuclear armaments on the satellite that will create untold devastation if they hit the atmosphere. At any rate, NASA is tasked with cleaning up the mission, and Frank, brought on as a consultant, decides to strong-arm Gerson: he'll only help if he and his buddies finally get to go on a space mission. Gerson agrees, but only if Frank and company can haul their geriatric asses through astronaut training and pass all of the medical tests.
There's a vague "the Cold War ain't done with us" subtext to Space Cowboys that sort of lines this up as a latter-day reflection on Eastwood's Firefox days, much like all of his post-'90s work is a reflection on something he did in his superstar heyday, though this is in part an accident: the first version of Ken Kaufman & Howard Klausner's script had the mission to fix an actual NASA sateillite, but the filmmakers couldn't secure support from NASA without removing the implication that the space agency was in the habit of dumping weapons into orbit and lying about it. And it certainly would all flow better and just generally make more sense - insofar as this scenario was ever going to make a significant amount of sense - without the complication of having Russia involved, but at the same time, Space Cowboys generally seems to view the actual stakes of its story as an imposition, and that would, I imagine, be no less true of a NASA-based threat.
No, the film cares about its four old men, whose journey through basic training is treated as the subject of warm-hearted character comedy. Eastwood rarely starred in comedies, and they're rarer still in his directorial canon, so it's not a huge surprise that Space Cowboys is rarely a laugh-out-loud riot; mostly, it's just putting its characters in awkward situations and letting them grin and quip their way out. This could easily be deadly, a lot of insincere kitsch that viewed itself as trash and its audience as rubes, and insofar as that doesn't happen, it's for two main reasons. The cast is obviously one of these: these are four immensely charismatic actors, and they're surrounded by actors qualified enough to give them some actual human forces to interact with, rather than just situations (besides Cromwell, Marcia Gay Harden and William Devane are the headliners in the supporting ensemble). The script is quite flat and lifeless, with some pretty rough dialogue that had to over-explain a lot (it has to give us an exposition dump at the start, and then again midway through), and it gives the leads extremely bland personalities: Tank, who has since become a Baptist preacher, is the only one of the four who isn't a full-on cliché, and Frank and Hawk are even the same cliché. I will not say that they skate through this all unscathed: Eastwood for his part, completely fucks up an early scene when he's meant to discover to his dread that Gerson is still at NASA, and the painfully leading dialogue feels awkward and alien in the actor's mouth; I am tempted to say it's the single worst scene of his entire career.
But they skate through it with only a few bumps and bruises, shall we say, redeeming some very hoary situations and absolutely implausible narrative developments (including a romantic subplot for Jones that the film seems positively mortified to include) with the big effortless charm of old-school movie stars. The bulk of the first hour that's basically just sitcom humor feels agreeably underplayed and natural in their hands, and this gets me to the other main reason this works: Eastwood's directing is wonderfully casual. He's not a comedy director, as I said, which happily means that he's not directing this as a comedy; the rhythms aren't leading up to punchlines, he's not overstressing jokey dialogue. It's his typical naturalistic style, but in the absence of the severe dramatic narratives he generally favored, that naturalism ends up feeling shaggy and lively in ways that make Space Cowboys much, much more amiable and friendly than it probably ought to be.
This all carries us through the first 70-ish minutes of a 130 minute film, and then the filmmakers can't put it off any more: the four old guys have to end up in space, and then there has to be space-related thrills and suspense. And this is actually where things get weird. When it's just hanging out on the ground, letting the actors fuck around, it's a good fit for the laconic energy everybody is bringing to the table, enough so that it all feels very thoughtfully put together. When it's an effects-driven summertime popcorn movie (with effects by Industrial Light & Magic, no less, at a time in the industry when that was still a pretty big deal and meant you wanted to have your effects taken seriously), it gets kind of... stupid. Eastwood might not be much of a comedy director, but he's absolutely no kind of special effects director at all, and the spectacular elements of Space Cowboy in its second half end up feeling very awkwardly spliced in with the actors looking very serious and concerned. It's kind of a bummer, and it's nearly half of the film's running time; Eastwood and Garner also seem palpably uncertain what they should be doing now, though Jones and especially Sutherland keep a handle on the slack energy that was so delightful to watch prior to this.
The result is still, on balance, a watchable lark if you're a fan of the actors, and I imagine it's a deadly, idiotic bore if your're not. But I imagine it was already that way long before it went into space. Basically, this is Eastwood's hangout movie, a chance to get himself and three other actors he knew he could trust to treat this all as a romp with no real sense of danger, and also a distinct sense of pride in having gotten old without being decrepit. Space Cowboys is a bit of a victory lap for the actors as much as the characters, a chance to show off that they can still sparkle and twinkle like any younger, bright star in the Hollywood firmament. And they can, is the thing, so even if this is ultimately a bit of a trivial bauble, it never feels entirely empty. It's still pretty low on the list of Eastwood's late-career triumphs (which didn't stop the Cahiers du Cinéma critics from putting it on their year-end top 10, in possibly the most blatant "whatever, we adore Clint" gesture in that publication's ongoing love affair with the director), but it's also one of the most limber films he ever directed, letting his cast stretch languidly into their roles at a relaxed pace. It's just plain watchable, with none of the severity of the director's greatest films and none of the stiff sloppiness of his worst films. It's kind of hokey and corny, but it also doesn't care about impressing anybody who uses "hokey" and "corny" as insults, and so it's just a nice time, nothing more, and happily, nothing less.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
