Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Boring

A Brilliant Conflict

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

On the surface, this movie should have been a great one. Here we have a great true story, involving a relentless search for truth, a government agency cover-up, a secret confidential source, and a tragedy that shook the nation. Coupled with a hero in the charismatic, eccentric and brilliant Richard Feynman, this could easily have been as good or better than say "Spotlight", or any other great movie of that genre. Yet, this movie, although OK, somehow misses. It's not great, has no great powerful moments, nor particularly funny or self deprecating. Something to watch when nothing else is on and no more.Some of the blame must go to the portrayal of the main character, on which the entire story revolves - prof. Richard Feynman. One of the greatest physicists in history, with a crazy rich past and eccentricities that are legendary, and he is simply boring! It is clear to me that neither William hurt who plays him, nor the director has bothered to watch any of his many televised lectures ind interviews. First of all - the famous Brooklyn accent. Than the constant cocky smile and sharp humor. The many anecdotes and metaphors that are often his way of explaining. Non of it are present here. If it were up to me Alan Alda would play him as he is both sorta looks like him and is funny, serious and can do a great accent. Also the constant emphasis on his illness is over the top and distracting.About the only really good thing I can attribute to this film is it's uncharacteristic accuracy. I didn't notice any factual errors, and that is rare in Hollywood.In summation, this is a mediocre movie, that with a better cast and writing staff could have been a great one. Too bad!

A TV movie about the true story of a physicist involved in the investigation of space shuttle Challenger's 1986 explosion. Like in "Devil's Knot", here too they chose to focus on fictionalized situations of the private life of the man, instead of focusing on the facts and the things that are really interesting about the disaster. Why would I care about the private life of this man? But that was expected, once you have a "dramatization" instead of a documentary.William Hurt is pretty good as an aging physicist in an atypical role and he plays very differently from many other roles I've seen him.With Brian Dennehy and Bruce Greenwood.

This is an extremely well done telling of the investigation surrounding the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Despite the fact that we all know the outcome of the findings, there are constantly rising stakes here which help keep you glued to the story.William Hurt is exceptional as physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the fact-finding commission, who almost single-handedly recognized the cause of the disaster and pushed the commission in the right direction. I did find his failing health issues to be important but overdone. The "peeing blood" and dialysis tended to take me out of the story when I'd already gotten and understood his health problems with the "x-ray" scene.Brian Dennehy also did a remarkable job of channeling William Rogers (as head of the Challenger fact-finding commission) who from the beginning wants to whitewash the whole the thing. Rogers was the Secretary of State under Richard Nixon which is hardly a vote of confidence for the man and any real neutrality.Overall, it would seem that history is not going to be kind to the Reagan Administration. The film does bring out facts that were never a part of any official commission findings implying those were repressed for apparently legitimate national security issues of the time. In a nutshell, the Reagan budget cuts caused NASA to promise the military the ability to launch military spy satellites via the shuttles almost on demand instead of the military developing their own new missile. Decidedly, putting temperature restrictions on such shuttle launches would not be something to tell the Soviets about. However, maybe in future years someone will realize that even this was a false concern because the launches would have been from the California coast where freezing temperatures would be almost non-existent.I highly recommend this film to relive this piece of recent history.

This is a drama-documentary that has been co produced by the BBC and they managed to attract a star cast with Oscar winner William Hurt playing distinguished scientist Feynman and Bruce Greenwood continuing his mini run of playing nice guys as General Kutyna.The drama is based on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986 and the Presidential commission set up to investigate the accident and the various factions some with their own self interest at stake who wanted to hinder the investigation or put it down to human error.The film had to summarise these investigations and sell it to the viewer in an easy to understand way and Feynman is the vehicle who was famous for making science accessible.Hurt portrays the man as dogged but he was also very ill at the time of the investigations. Kutyna gives him clues along the way. Eve Best who plays Sally Ride was rather sidelined, in real life she was more outspoken with the deficiencies of NASA when it comes to safety.It all came down to 'O' rings and how they reacted in sub zero temperatures and the reveal at a press conference was exactly how it happened in real life.A good well acted drama but a little bit too nicely packaged to make it digestible for the viewing audience.