Good Night Oppy

From the earliest days, Man has looked to the skies and wondered what is out there. As technology advanced, humans have been able to travel first to orbit around the Earth, and then to the Moon. But the inhospitable climate of Mars made it an unlikely area of exploration. However, in the early-2000s, teams of NASA scientists and engineers designed and launched two robotic rovers in an attempt to survey the surface of Mars. Good Night Oppy is the unlikely story of those missions.

The story begins with the early design process of the rovers, which would need to survive dust storms and extreme temperatures, not to mention requiring parachutes and airbags to help the heavy rovers survive their initial landing. Director Ryan White has a gift for the creation of his film, as beyond the current interviews he is able to conduct with members of the teams, there is a great deal of footage of design meetings, building, testing, and mission control. We are able to see the team interviewed now, but also see what these same people went through throughout the missions. The care and dedication of the NASA scientists and engineers is inspiring. Once the teams have assembled twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, we find out that getting them successfully to Mars will be one of the biggest challenges.

The NASA scientists are candid at this point in the film that several previous attempts had failed, some purely on human error, and that getting the rovers where they need to be will be like “hitting a hole in one from 51 million miles away”. But the calculations are correct, and both rovers hit their targets. From the beginning, Spirit is in a more inhospitable area, while Opportunity is referred to as the “lucky” rover. But the rovers surprise the scientists and the world at large. The missions, initially intended to last approximately 3 months, go on much longer. Thanks to dust devil storms which occasionally clean off the solar panels, Spirit lasts for nearly 7 years and Opportunity for nearly 15 years.

This is a story that could have been interesting but dry in the wrong hands. But White engages his audience both by assembling the archival footage and interviews well, and by essentially anthropomorphizing the rovers. Through the use of CGI replications of the missions, we follow the trials and travails that the rovers encounter on Mars. From broken wheels, to dust stuck in gears (referred to as arthritis) and computer failure (referred to as memory loss). We come to care about Spirit and Opportunity like we would characters in any narrative film – like another famous film robot, WALL-E,whose design was inspired by these very rovers. We hear the scientists and engineers take justifiable pride in the achievements and tenacity of their “children”, who continued to outperform expectations for years, and gave the world the first proof that there had been drinkable water at some time in Mars’s history. White’s pushing of the personality of the rovers and use of Angela Bassett’s narration to do so may sometimes drift into the territory of emotional manipulation, but it is damned effective. I certainly didn’t expect to tear up multiple times in a documentary about robots, but I did. Another great strength of the film is music. There is diegetic music, as a tradition of NASA mission control was to play wake up songs for the rovers each day, and there is also Blake Neely’s beautiful score.

Good Night Oppy is a powerful testament to the strength of human ingenuity and a record of
what brilliant people can do when they come together with a common goal.

Good Night Oppy is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.