Movie Review: Good Night, Oppy (2022). Amazon Prime.

This enchanting documentary of space exploration in our own era tells an uplifting story of our intelligent machines, and the fascinating emotional relationships we humans can develop with them. It seems perfect for the current moment, with our rising excitement but also fears about A.I. and robotics, and how the development of these technologies may affect us.

Two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity (or "Oppy", as it became known), were launched in 2003, and arrived six weeks apart on the surface of Mars in early 2004. Each was expected to last only a few months, but both ended up continuing to operate, and send back astonishing pictures, videos and data about Mars, for many years instead.  Spirit lasted for more than six years, until 2010; Opportunity lasted an astonishing 14 years before its final signal in 2018, surviving and continuing to explore and broadcast despite mechanical failures, unexpected harsh surface conditions and technical mishaps. 

This film is the delightful tale of these two extraordinary Mars rovers, and the marvelous discoveries they made and shared with humanity. But it is also a very human story of the individuals and teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who invented the rovers, designed, assembled and tested them, successfully sent them to Mars, and then controlled and monitored their explorations from Earth.   

We meet some of the dedicated space scientists at JPL, and get to share their experiences working on the project, their growing amazement and wonder at the longevity of their far-away mechanical team members on the Martian surface, and the affection and feelings they develop with the passing years for these intrepid machines, as they work together to overcome problems so the rovers can continue to send data and photos back to them.   

Using archival footage and recent interviews, the movie shows team members at various stages of their careers and the rover project, and how they increasingly anthropomorphized the remote robots, cheered them on, and coped with their ultimate demise and their grief about it, after nearly a human generation's worth of the rovers' service and communications from Mars.

This is an inspiring and hopeful story of humans, robots and true-life adventures in space, with amazing samples of the huge volume of photos and videos of Mars taken by the rovers, and an excellent Hollywood-quality sound track. Recommended.