Goodnight Oppy: The 'Little Mars Rover that Could' Doc is Robotic Hagiography

Rating: C

Liam Lacey

The documentary, Goodnight Oppy, is the sort of film you expect to see at your local museum or science center for school-age children. It’s a real-life Wall-E story, that’s easy to follow, full of emotion and Hollywood budget, and intended to elicit wonder and admiration for the National Aeronautics and Space Association. 

The film is presented as as a biography of the NASA’s Mars exploration rover, Opportunity, which was launched to Mars in 2003, along with another rover, Spirit. Their purpose was to find geological evidence of past water, and therefore potential life, on Mars.

Opportunity, the star of our show.

Both machines lasted long beyond their 90-day designed lifespan, with Spirit shutting down in 2010 and  Opportunity in 2018, recharging its batteries using solar power, and hibernating to preserve power during dust storms.

The film, which is available on Prime Video on Nov. 23, is a slick affair, co-produced by Amazon and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. It’s bolstered with extensive computer-generated photo-realistic animation of by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, a soaring score from Blake Neely and voice-over narration from Angela Bassett.

Director Ryan White (The Case Against 8) focuses on how much the NASA team anthropomorphized the rovers - which, one of them acknowledges, are essentially boxes of wires. From the start, the rovers are described as female, twin  “sisters” which have different personalities.

Spirit we are told, often makes errors and she is like the teen-ager who stays up all night playing video games, while Opportunity is “little Miss Perfect.”  The first bits of progress are “baby steps.: When they wear out, they have “arthritis” and dementia.

Some of the rovers’ relatable human characteristics were built in: The rovers had cameras set at the resolution of 20-20 eye-sight, their heights were that of an average human.

It’s not entirely surprising that the group of international men and women who worked on the project over a decade and a half of their lives, day and night, came to compare them to their children and their grandparents.  

But the effort to humanize the rovers often feels forced, and the interviews selectively edited. There are so many times we see scenes of the group breaking into applause and cheering when the Opportunity has pulled out of a jam, it begins to feel routine, like another Apollo 13 climactic scene every 20 minutes.

While the celebration of exploration and discovery  seems a benign goal, Goodnight Oppy pushes the “ahh” and the “awe” buttons too often and too zealously. By the end of the film, when Oppy lost her signal in a Martian dust storm, I wasn’t sure if I should hug my toaster or clean my loved ones’ crumb trays.

Goodnight Oppy. Available on Prime Video on Nov. 23. Directed by Ryan White. Written by Ryan White and Helen Kearns. Narration by Angela Bassett.