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Starsnstripes1974
Reviews
Challenger (1990)
Deeply disappointing on every possible level
This was the first attempted dramatization of the 1986 tragedy and came out as an ABC TV-movie 4 years after, airing February 25, 1990. The movie was filmed in Houston in the late summer of 1989. Sadly, this production disappoints on virtually every imaginable level: It is horribly written, badly acted, cheaply directed and abysmally edited. It is loaded with flaws and gaffes from start to finish, such as the apparent desire to just throw in any archival footage of any space shuttle that looks "pretty". In two scenes at least, the scene is launch day and they are using roll-out footage of the vehicle moving towards the pad, because it ilks pretty! In the very last shot where they are supposedly aiming to show Challenger's final fateful liftoff they've cut together footage from a bright, afternoon launch with an early morning takeoff that is so mis-matched it is irritating. The sets are horrible too. They try to pass off the Mission Control room in Houston as the Florida launch control firing room. They pay no attention to detail. They have photographs and mission emblems decorating the NASA offices that were from flights AFTER the disaster.
The dialogue is horribly cheesy and makes the astronauts sound dumb. In one early scene, Christa the teacher can't do a simple 3rd grade multiplication problem in her head, and Onizuka welcomes her on first meeting as " our journalist in space," to which Smith corrects him "TEACHER in space, fool!" Come on! These are some of the brightest people in the country, are we supposed to buy that they're this lame? The press asks stupid questions, not knowing who Judy Resnik is, among other things. Also ridiculous is how every scene with Onizuka makes him out to be a dipstick, such as coming home from the bar at 2 a.m. and arguing with his wife, or her teasing him as a "pineapple picker from Hawaii" in front of the other families. Who dreamed up the need to fake this " family drama" crap? I could itemize every stupid line or every gaffe in this production, but the point is it is very badly and cheaply done. The acting is second-rate at best, the lines are stupid and bland, and the production seems randomly thrown together with whatever archive film or video of space shuttles they could find.
Someday, hopefully, there will be an actual movie about Challenger, hopefully an epic done by Ron Howard or the like, similar to Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff, something that will excel and honor the story and the astronauts and not cheapen everything. I'm looking forward to THAT movie and hope it's not too far off in the future, now that the 20th anniversary of this tragedy just passed this winter.