Avião Foguete X-15

If you are an aviation junkie than X-15 is the film for you. You will understand and grasp more readily than any of us ordinary film fans what's going on. I had to consult Wikipedia about the X-15 so I was sure of what I was writing.

The narrator of the film was well known Hollywood aviator James Stewart whose love of flying and flight was deep and sincere. He was in fact a general in the Air Force Reserve from his wartime experiences. Stewart always took a reverential approach to flight, possibly too reverential to make his projects entertaining enough. It was the biggest flaw with Strategic Air Command.

Perhaps had X-15 been done as a straight documentary it would have been better. We never really get involved with any of the characters of the test pilots and their homes and families. It was true that one test pilot of the X-15 was killed during the experiments and one of the pilots is killed in the film.

The X-15 was kind of a not missing link between airplanes and rocket travel. It had rocket power that boosted it straight into the highest altitudes yet known and it sure was faster than anything yet known. The experiments would provide a lot of data for NASA to design the space capsules that our Mercury and later Gemini astronauts used.

It would have made a great documentary the X-15 story. For aviation buffs this film's a 10. It's something less for the rest of us.

I remember reading an interview with Mary Tyler Moore when she was just making the transition from a supporting role in a sitcom (Laura Petrie in The Dick van Dyke Show) to a starring role (Mary Richards in the Mary Tyler Moore Show). "X-15" was one of her earliest film roles. She made no bones about how awful she thought the film was. And by far, the most interesting thing about the film is the out-the-windshield cockpit footage, which is real. The rest of the film was, according to Moore, shot in three days and was of course mere fill, and it shows. It was barely up to the standard of the most forgettable soap operas of the 1960s.

The X-15 rocket plane program was famous and a really big deal in its time. The X-15's rocket engine burned through its fuel supply in just two minutes, so it couldn't waste time taking off; it was drop-launched at altitude from under the wing of a B-52, and like the space shuttle orbiter, it glided back to the ground. I wonder: Did the studio somehow luck into possession of a lot of Air Force B-reel footage shot from the cockpit camera of the X-15 for research purposes and decide to try for a quick buck, or did they deliberately commission this?

From the late 50s, this early Charles Bronson starrer dramatized the real-life development of the rocket-powered X-15 experimental aircraft, which was launched from the belly of a B-52 bomber and was flown by test pilots to high speeds and high altitude in an effort to touch the edge of space.

The X-15 was a successful part of the development program that also included precursors like the X-1 and the Stiletto, and later produced pilots for NASA and technology used in early space shuttle concepts.

I saw the film more than once on its initial run, and it seems to me this was sometimes double-billed with the somewhat similar air power goings-on of Karl Maulden's BOMBERS B-52.

So, this is a Richard Donner movie (his first one), starring Charles Bronson in a lead role and it has James Stewart(!) narrating but yet no one has ever heard off this movie? It sounds all weird but there actually is a very logical explanation for it; the movie just isn't very good or memorable.

It's hard to even really call this a movie in the first place. It's stuck somewhere between being a documentary and a slow moving drama. The entire story is being told in such a way that it almost feels like a documentary you are watching, complete with a lot of technical details and background information about the airplanes and missions. No big surprise, since the movie got actually made with the help of the space program and the air force. In a way you could even call this movie a piece of propaganda.

But the movie also still tries to tell a story. Not hard enough though. Everything remains terribly underdeveloped, this goes for the story as well as for all of its characters. The movie also never becomes a very interesting one to watch because of that very same reason. There is not a clear enough main plot line that it is following and because of that also all of the developments in it fall short and everything feels without consequences. It doesn't matter at all for the viewer when a test fails, or a plane blows up. You just don't ever feel involved enough with any of it, to care about anything.

It all also makes this movie a bit of a boring one and definitely also overlong, since it starts to repeat itself pretty early on already and sometimes scenes just go on for far too long, without serving really a purpose for the movie in the first place.

It really doesn't matter at all that Charles Bronson, amongst others is in this movie. None of the characters get to do anything good or interesting and the acting and whole directing approach of this movie reminded me of a '50's science-fiction flick, that too desperately wanted to be taken serious as a movie. It feels the need to throw in all kinds of technical aspects and nonsensical questions, that are completely irrelevant in todays perspective. It's all very forced and wooden and lacks depth of any sort.

But please, allow me to also still say something positive about this movie. Because it got made with the help of the air force, the aerial moments are great looking ones. Normally movies like this would had uses some standard archive footage of planes flying but this movie is very consistent with its look and often shows some great, insightful, moments in the air, also often from the perspective of the pilot.

At first I also was very excited when hearing James Stewart narrating this thing. However strangely enough the narration suddenly stops half way through the movie and Stewart can't be heard again, until the very end of the movie.

Do yourself a favor and watch "The Right Stuff" instead. It for some part handles some of the same subjects, about the earliest days of the space program and test flying but it does this a far more interesting and exciting way, than this movie ever does.

5/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

As a teenager I don't see myself falling into the average 6 voting. Even though the 60s is not my decade, I still love this movie. It should be appreciated for the simply its existence. Besides the Right Stuff, we don't really see much of them depict the space race so specifically. Starring MTM and Bronson is better than random actors anyways. At least we see how fine MTM use to be.

Inviting popular movie stars showed how important this project is. The power of how much people cares during that decade is amazing compare to the significance of it today. Usually, how much public cares indicates how well the technological advancement is going to turn out.Unfortunately that enthusastism is long gone... You won't see another movie over space exploration anymore.