The Right Stuff: Directed by Philip Kaufman. With Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid. The U.S. space program’s development from the breaking of the sound barrier to selection of the Mercury 7 astronauts, from a group of test pilots with a more seat-of-the-pants approach than the program’s more cautious engineers preferred.

I swear that I’ve seen this in the past and I sought it out to watch whilst constructing space themed LEGOs, though that plastic plan fell apart due to completing the task during my last binge of LEGO meditations. I had no memory of the film though, so maybe I had missed it in the past, and I was pretty shocked to find out it’s over 3 hours long, which is an unheard of length for movies that came out in the early 80s, just absolutely incredible. It’s a good enough film, but there’s at least 3 different main stories that I would have had in separate films: the run up to the space program, the space program up to it’s first launch, then all the things that happened after that, including the crazy hatch situation and eventual deaths of several of the astronauts in a fire.

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