Review of The Right Stuff (1983) by Scott R — 15 Jan 2018

I'm not a contrarian by nature but I just don't get all the great reviews for this bloated movie. I'm so annoyed with how bad I thought it was in comparison to all these fawning reviews I was motivated to join the site and post my first review.

First of all, I'm not a pilot and I've never flown supersonic, but even I know that the scenes depicting the test pilots' race to break the speed of sound and then continue going faster was silly. Clouds have mass, especially thick cumulus clouds. No way that Yeager or any of those other guys would have been trying to break speed records by flying through clouds that generally weigh thousands of pounds (look it up). And when planes going that fast go out of control, they don't spin around like they were being thrown into the air by a third-grader. Aerodynamics don't work like that.

Second, the movie is long. I mean, L-O-N-G. I watched it on TCM and Manckewicz was talking to some guest who said the director Kaufman was ordered to cut the movie to a reasonable time but he refused because he just didn't see anything that could be sacrificed for his artistic vision. So the movie gets released, no one goes to see it, and it's credited with causing the movie company to shut down. Sometimes the studio has it right. This would have been much more tolerable if it was 2 hours long instead of 47. (Or maybe it only seemed like 47...).

The tone of the movie is maddening, because there isn't one. Sometimes it's pure historical drama, sometimes it tries for poignancy, sometimes it tries to be a screwball comedy - it's like someone rolled dice every morning before shooting to decide what mood they were going to try to set. The result is an awkward, disjointed mess.

Lastly, and this is just personal preference, for the most part I was not fond of some of the casting. Shepard's a great playwright but I always found him to be a mediocre actor. Same with Barbara Hershey. Same with Fred Ward. Ed Harris does OK here. Jeff Goldblum's talents are squandered. Quaid and Scott Glenn, especially, do a nice job, but not enough to redeem this mess. I remember the only acting performance that really made me lean forward and pay attention was the small part of Jack Ridley. I recognized that lazy southern accent - it was Levon Helm from The Band. I wish he had done more in front of the camera before he passed away.

So this is a longer review than most, and you're probably bored by now. This will give you some small sense of what I spent 3 hours doing trying to watch this movie hoping that at some point I would see why so many critics loved it. I guess I'm more with the unwashed masses with this one - and they all stayed away. You should too.....