14 Minutes from Earth

I couldn't get through the first 15 minutes because the narrator was so atrocious. I think the Google Assistant sounds better narrating this movie than the guy narrating the movie. That and it was poorly written my high school teenager could have written a better script no waste your time

The movie begins with a description of the stratosphere and how little we know about it, in addition to how critical it is - then we get into the story of trying to raise a human to the stratosphere so he can fall through it. If the idea is to collect data on the stratosphere, I believe developing a drone that could remain in position for more than a few minutes would be much more productive. This movie with the pictures of his kids, the interview with his wife and co-workers at Google, all seemed staged to be nothing more than stroking this guy's ego. I just don't see how falling through the stratosphere (which has been done approximately 60 years ago), is going to give you enough data worth the time and expense. The movie was just a PR stunt, why else would you film it? It's like bad reality television.

I don't think anyone would really believe a documentary would be released of a failure, or of the main character dying, so the cliffhanger moments are really overdone. And as has been noted by other reviewers: the science we're promised at the beginning is entirely missing. What really grated on my sense of reality was calling him their "pilot" - he had no more control than Abraham Lincoln would, if they had dropped a penny from that height, so he wasn't piloting anything. But if you can get past all that, it's actually an interesting story about a lot of money being spent to seriously risk a man's life just to break someone else's useless record. No mention at all is made of the ONE guy who originally did this for actual science - Colonel Joe Kittinger.

In principle this should have been a stellar movie. The story is interesting, the visuals frequently dramatic, and there are lots of details that can be explained to appeal to the likely audience.

Unfortunately the writer/directors seemed to think they were creating a piece of Reality TV. The entire movie is paced and narrated in Reality TV style -- narrator says something, then the even happens and participants say the exact same thing, then five minutes later narrator repeats the thing. The audience are treated as morons who can't remember anything for longer than 30 seconds, and who need even the most trivial issues explained to them.

And so rather than a serous, technical documentary that would have a natural audience, we have this nonsense which will appeal to no-one. Engineers watching it will lose patience within 20 minutes, those uninterested in engineering would rather be watching the Real Housewives of Silicon Valley.

The obvious comparison is to the Red Bull Stratos movie, Mission to the Edge of Space. Regardless of the differences in engineering approach, the latter is a vastly superior movie because the creators know and respect their audience.

What a bunch of cowboys. God help us if this is how Google develop and deploy engineering solutions. I guess the cost of stuffing up a code deployment is lower than killing a man. Glad Google haven't decided to enter the space race. 😀 That said it's entertaining viewing!