I really liked this movie sixteen years ago. I was an ideal audience, partly because I built models of fighters and carriers, flew model rockets, and was eager to see lots of military hardware. But the real reason is that I was 14 years old.<br /><br />This movie comprehends life at about the level of a 14-year-old. Watching it again as an adult was painful. After every visual cliche, after every scene of buffoonery (almost innumerable) I told myself it would get better, that the scenes of space flight were coming. But there was nothing but more weak dialog, trite phrases and ... even the shot framing was corny.<br /><br />And that dreadful score. Bill Conti really reached a new level of inappropriateness (beyond his previous best misunderstanding of theme, style and sentiment with "For Your Eyes Only"). Here we have a movie about individualists, talented, flashy egotists. Maybe an appropriate musical representation would be an exciting solo instrument against orchestra, in other words a concerto. For no conceivable reason, however, Conti takes the theme of a very famous concerto ... and plays it with full orchestra only, minus the fireworks of the violin part. So there is no symbolism of the one against the many, just a vaguely joyous melody. And then just to make sure we know it's really Bill Conti's score, and not Pete Tchaikovsky, he changes two notes.<br /><br />Conti has done some straightforwardly uplifting music (especially towards the beginning of his career), but this is simply cheap "proud and happy" music. And why "Mars, Bringer of War" by Holst in yet another film? "Finlandia" is just as universally known to musicians, and would have made more sense as "music of overcoming" (gravity, technical troubles).<br /><br />The obnoxious "Foreign Man" character in the meetings was supposed to be Werner von Braun, ex-Nazi rocket-team leader. The man was a genius, and he was cunning, imaginative and by most accounts impressive. If, for lack of time, he could not be shown rounded, he could at least have been characterized as formidable, secretive, dangerous. That's just as simple.<br /><br />LBJ was loquacious and persuasive, not a yeller or a whiner and not such a carnival barker in public. I dislike the man and his decisions, but why make him into a plain old jackass when he was an effective and charismatic user of people?<br /><br />Surely Harris and Shepard knew this was a bad script. They make the absolute best out of the meager diet they were fed. And under such obvious direction: "Smile when the light goes across", "Look up after a second", "React with surprise" and so on, making the actors seem like puppets sometimes.<br /><br />I suppose Jeff Goldblum had to take what he could get in those days, but it's still disappointing to have to sit through his gags (literally).<br /><br />The wives seem to be thrown in to get females into the theater. The point their characters make didn't even need them on the screen to be made. The men could have confessed, maybe in a bar scene, to the marital woe and guilt that plagued them as a result of their chosen career. And shaved off a good half-an-hour in the process. The wives contributed almost nothing else to the story. Drag without lift.<br /><br />It won for Best Editing. Could have been Most Editing. When objects fly in the movie, they are seen this way: here it comes (from the left), there it goes (to the left), here it comes (from below), there it goes (off the bottom), now it wobbles (to show how fast it's going), the dials on the instrument panel turn, then out the front window, now where did it go?, now it's coming right at you, and last just the vapor trail seen from the ground. This sequence occurs almost edit-for-edit whenever something goes more than 55mph, and it's dull.<br /><br />Before I saw it again on DVD, I would have given it an 8 from my fond memories. I have to give it a 4, alongside such cinematic triumphs as "Dirty Dancing" and "Creepshow 2".<br /><br />By the way, the NASA logo shown throughout was not used until the mid-60's. Am I wrong to be so bothered by that? When the movie is about NASA, I don't think so.<br /><br />And as for the record: Never before have I sweated with embarrassment all the way through a movie.