SPOILERS HEREIN! This film is for children. Lonely children with no friends who need a moral pickup. But nobody else. I can live with inventing people for a "historical" story that never existed. I guess I can handle utterly obvious plot lines. I can definitely handle sweet VFX that was almost on par with Apollo13. What I cannot handle is, for example, these nice effects in stark contrast with old, grainy stock footage used in the same manner. I cannot handle the total butchery of history. This film creates the impression that the first rocket the Americans built that didn't blow up was the one carrying the chimpanzee. The first space mission, indeed. Explorer satellite? What's that? Of course, the entire existence of the Houston launch facility was, well, ignored in this film. As usual, the annoying lead brat saves the day more than once (come on, we've all seen films like this before), of course he gets to show all the other kids who tormented him how cool he is by posing with Alan Sheppard. Of course, even after living in the US for fifteen years the German engineers never eat anything else but Sauerkraut, Bratwurst and Schnitzel. And they all drive Volkswagens. There never was a Werner von Braun. And there only were three German engineers throughout Nasa. Not to mention that a private company was trying to sell the US Government a rocket design of their own that looked suspiciously like something that the actual von Braun designed for a 1950s Sci-Fi Film. The film is utterly predictable, ridiculous in it's premise, Woods wasted his talent here, basically portraying an animated broomstick during the entire first half of the film. All the plot devices have been done a hundred times before, and with much more style. Even though the shots of the launching rocket looked sweet enough (on the TV screen they didn't loose much compared to Apollo13), in other shots you could literally see the edge of the blue screen. It's okay enough for kids under twelve, but an abomination before celluloid and mental hemorrhage inducing for everybody else.
Review of Race to Space
