A Christmas Star

My astronomy-loving husband and I both LOVED this movie. It focused on the relationship between the characters and not just a superficial "romance." It also showed realistic problem-solving involving the differences in the characters lives. My favorite 2021 GAC Christmas movie!

Up and coming female astronomer in New York crunches data and figures out there is a 78% likelihood a yet undiscovered meteor shower event will take place on one of five days leading up to Christmas. And the prime viewing location is a peak just outside a small upstate community. So she gets clearance and takes a telescope with her to the location. (All filmed in Canada.)

Once there she finds a mixup with hotel reservations and is aided by a local family that own and run the hotel, she is put up and befriended by all of them, including a nice man who has been told his ranger job is being eliminated for lack of funding. As things unfold and complications with the Christmas festival and its bright lights make things a bigger challenge, the astronomer and the ranger begin to take a serious liking to each other.

My wife and I watched it at home on Amazon streaming. It is a cute story with attractive people, very much like a Hallmark movie. Just don't take any of the highly flawed astronomy seriously. Plus, they even got "reflector" and "refractor" telescopes mixed up in the dialog. But hey, it's just a movie.

This is mostly an unusual story, although there is the ever-present Christmas Festival. Sara Canning and Daniel Lissing have good chemistry. The overall acting is mostly fair.

The climax is too sappy, even cheesy, a little too much for me and I like sappy.

From a technical standpoint regarding Astronomy, I give this movie tons of credit because one of the running themes through the movie is light pollution. Other technical aspects were very mixed.

GAC Family has put out once again a wonderful Christmas Movie called A Christmas Star. The two stars that were in the movie are Daniel Lissing from When Calls The Heart and Sara Canning from the Vampire Diaries. The Director of the movie is Jessica Harmon. She did such a phenomenal job at directing , picking the location to shoot. Well done Jessica and also picking the BEST actors to star in it.

A Christmas Star is one of Daniel Lissing's best Christmas Movie he has ever done in his career. Sine he movies to GAC Family Network I think his career has skyrocketed. This is the best move that Dan could have ever done. He was o phenomenonal on When Calls the Heart as Jack Thornton, but this by far is the BEST movie and Character he has ever played. He shows the soft side of him and it shows how diverse Dan is. He can play any character good or bad and he makes you love that character. Thank you Dan.

I absolutely love this movie and recommend it to families to watch and get to know Dan. Well done well done.

Sara Canning as Madeline wow this was her BEST work she has ever done in my book. Sara showed us that you can find love in the right place at the right time as Madeline. Sara has a diverse career. I mean she can play any character and you love that character. Sara played on the vampire diaries, Kevel 16, the right kind of wrong etc..

Dan and Sara the BEST work I have seen you do. Thank you.

I recommend you watching the movie.

It was a nice story and acting was good, but it was hard for me an old astronomer type to not ignore the "Literally Glaring" faults in the filming. Come on, massive lights at the mountain cabin with no electric service there? Roaring fire and lights right next to the telescope. Massive lights below and only turned off the extra Christmas lights.

Light reflecting off the atmospheric humidity would have destroyed any good telescope reading at the cabin. Total lights off for quarter mile and a flashlight only used to setup is all that is allowed. Been then and done this often. But then they could not film a true professional astronomer in action in total darkness.

So I let that all pass and enjoyed the story and good acting by all. They should have at least not placed 1000 Christmas lights on a remote mountain cabin. It did not look remote at all.

I do give them credit for at least trying an astronomical story line. GAC has been good with their stories and acting but too glitzy for this story to come true.