Good Night Oppy (2022)

I thought that was going to be far more interesting than it ended up being. The documentary tells us the story of the hugely innovative and ambitious task to send two motorised, solar-powered, rovers to Mars. One called "Spirit", the other the eponymously nick-named "Opportunity". History tells us what happened, but I was was very much hoping for more meat on the bones of this astonishing feat of science and engineering than is delivered in this rather dry, vox-pop style, recounting of the project. It is interspersed with occassional actuality, but there is a real paucity of that as this trundles along in a remarkably sterile fashion delivering little of the senses of excitement, frustration and enthusiasm that must have been experienced by this team as the venture gathered pace. Indeed, this whole thing really rather lacks any pace at all. It is more of a video-diary style chronology peppered with some overly earnest contributions. Some of the "wake-up" songs are quite good but whoever concluded that delivering us a host of scientists doing pieces-to-camera was going to prove engaging just, in my opinion, missed an "oppy" to populate this with much more of the imagery NASA collected. It all ends rather sentimentally too and left me feeling just a bit disappointed..