Combining the amazing skills of NASA and Walt Disney Pictures should provide a movie that is something special, and “Roving Mars,” on which the two collaborated, is exactly that. It opens today at the St. Louis Science Center, where the IMAX projection makes it even more amazing.
The cynical curmudgeonly part of me realizes that the movie is partly a concerted lobbying effort to convince Congress to provide enough money to continue the space program, but as someone who remembers the first Sputnik, this was a thrilling piece of work, combining the real footage shot by NASA and the amazing animation created by Disney’s artists. It’s put together almost seamlessly, though one can usually tell where one style stops and the other starts. Makes no difference. It’s still mind-boggling.
NASA engineers and scientists designed the pair of six-wheeled vehicles that would be flown to Mars, deposited and left to wander across the planet, controlled by radio signals from Mission Control. Construction and testing, shot by NASA cinematographers, is complex and difficult, and narrator George Butler, who also collaborated on direction and writing, makes the complexity sound easy.
Once the rovers get to Mars, the Disney animators take over, but there were many images that traveled from there to here and were available as models. Watching the little solar-powered vehicles make their way across the red planet is fascinating, and to realize that one of them still is active, years after its power plant was supposed to die a natural death, makes the film — and the work of the NASA folks — come alive as a real tribute to the men and women who made it possible.
Roving Mars opens today at the St. Louis Science Center
— Joe