Good Night Oppy is less of a documentary and more of a gigantic kid-friendly commercial to convince kids to pursue a career in science. The STEM-positive film follows the voyage of the twin rovers that were sent to Mars to discover if the planet once sustained life, Spirit and Opportunity – optimistic names for an optimistic quest. Ryan White’s film never falters from its positive tone, which fits the attitude of the NASA team behind it. The story is indeed sweet, stacked with plenty of passionate people who eagerly share their experiences to White and his camera, inputting their emotional journeys onto these rovers as if they were kin with WALL-E. There’s no denying these scientists are great at their jobs, and they are even better at inspiring others with their zeal, emoting their joy through their body language, waving their arms around with excitement and smiling ear to ear in every interview.
White does a great job at evoking sentimental feelings for these robots, with the help of narration by Angela Bassett that lends some personality to both Spirit and Opportunity. It’s a good technique to guide the audience, to feed life into something that’s lifeless. However, the conventional way White conducts the interviews creates a staleness to Good Night Oppy. He never guides any of his talking heads much past the surface. Tidbits about their personal lives are scattered here and there, but a majority of the time they are instructed to discuss the mission at hand, bullet point by bullet point. There’s a tedium to this approach of filmmaking, a flatness that unfortunately has become standard practice in documentary filmmaking as of late. It’s a barrier that prevents filmmakers from experimenting with the form, like a rock in the sand that can’t be driven over.
The NASA employees project personalities onto Spirit and Opportunity, with Spirit being the angsty teenager and Opportunity being the determined overachiever, able to persevere through all setbacks. Good Night Oppy spends so much time on creating an emotional connection to the two rovers that it forgets to inject story into the relationships with the co-workers that took the journey with them. The only tissue that binds these people together is the good-morning pop song that starts their day, when the archival footage shows all of the participants in the same space, bobbing their heads to the same catchy tune. Emotional investment is what makes any film work, and Good Night Oppy’s main issue is that it’s too focused on accurately portraying the history of the project over bringing together the people who poured their lives into making it a success.
This article appears in November 4 • 2022.