Pretty Good

As Good As It Gets

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It is really hard to describe this film. It's not a documentary, or a film that's supposed to show you everything about Yuri Gagarin's flight.It simply shows you the first manned flight into outer space from Gagarin's perspective. That's pretty much all it does. And it is magnificent.It is not often we get the opportunity to see one of mankind's greatest achievements from a front-row seat.Even if you don't make it to the end, it is worthwhile to watch for some time, if only to see the world like Gagarin did during this incredible feat.

When you are going to see this film, you have to know the history of the film. By matching the orbit of the International Space Station to that of Vostok 1, the spacecraft of Gagarin, as closely as possible, in terms of ground path and time of day, documentary filmmaker Christopher Riley and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli were able to film the view that Yuri Gagarin saw on his pioneering orbital space flight. So you see with your own eyes what the first human in space saw. The film is supported by the Russian mission control and the breathtaking music of Philip Sheppard, which Sheppard donated to this new film project. When you want to see fast rockets, much archive footage, and many interviews with astronauts, you should pick an other movie, but if you want to see something special, you should definitely watch this.

If you want to hear someone saying "I'm feeling great" in Russian a hundred and fifty thousand times, this is the film for you. For everyone else: You should avoid it.My god! It's not often that someone manages to take a really interesting subject and make it into a snooze fest. There was a real opportunity here. I love the space race, and I would've loved to see a documentary that finally did justice to the Russian part of it. But no. Instead you get an hour and a half of NASA stock footage, with Russian radio recordings as "voice-over"... With subtitles.Need I go on?