THE STORY – Are we alone in the universe? For over half a century, legendary NASA engineer and best-selling science fiction author, Gentry Lee, has explored every aspect of this question in the realms of space science, robotic exploration and the human imagination. At age 82, he has come to a revelatory conclusion.
THE CAST – Gentry Lee
THE TEAM – Robert Stone (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 85 Minutes
When making a documentary feature, it generally behooves one to focus on a single subject – be it a person, place, or thing. You can focus on more than one subject, but without the proper length, your film will become as thin as a piece of paper and float away, lacking the necessary weight to stay anchored to the ground. Unfortunately, while Robert Stone’s new film “Starman” has several fascinating subjects to revolve around, its focus is spread so thin that it never coheres into a satisfying whole, unable to give a concise answer to the all-important question of what it’s even about.
NASA robotics engineer and best-selling sci-fi author Gentry Lee has lived one hell of a life. After being discovered calculating the batting averages of the Brooklyn Dodgers by himself at five years old by a Columbia University professor, he spent most of his youth floundering until President Kennedy spoke about the importance of space exploration. The President’s words inspired him so deeply that he went to work for NASA, where he eventually served as the chief engineer for the Galileo mission that sent a space probe to orbit Jupiter for the first time. Lee’s passion for his work and the big questions that accompany it is infectious. He has excellent knowledge of the subjects presented, but he gets so excited when talking about specific things that you can feel his heart starting to beat faster. In turn, this raises the excitement and interest level of all those listening to him. In this way, he’s an ideal documentary subject.
The problem is that “Starman” isn’t really about Lee. We get a bit of biography in the film’s opening act, and the film follows him through various missions he worked on at NASA, but he’s not the true subject of the film. What exactly the film’s subject is, though, is difficult to say. Considering the wide range of topics Lee covers in his monologue – space exploration, aliens and alien abductions, science fiction writing and how it influences actual scientific advancements, the media’s problematic coverage of NASA’s work, various technical details of the missions he worked on, the agony and ecstasy felt by the team at NASA about the discoveries they made – you’d be forgiven for thinking that the film’s subject is “things that Gentry Lee has learned over his storied career,” but the closest thing the film has to an actual throughline is the question of whether or not there is life elsewhere in the universe.
As Lee himself says, this is one of the great questions that has plagued human existence, and it’s a worthy one for a documentary to tackle. However, Stone doesn’t organize the film in a way that actually puts that question at the center of everything. The film could have been a glorified lecture, like the recent “Made in England,” which allowed one interview subject (Martin Scorsese) to talk endlessly about one thing (the films of Powell & Pressburger), supplemented by archival footage and the interview subject’s own personal feelings after studying the matter at hand for most of their life. Unfortunately, it’s not. Lee is our only narrator, but his storytelling is too scattered to be cohesive. The film bounces around in time, from 1969 to 1964 to 1972 to the 2000s and back again, seemingly going wherever Lee wants to take the story next, without any thought put into making these disparate threads into a solid whole.
At several points, Lee bemoans that the public and the media don’t understand what was truly revolutionary about NASA’s space exploration program, implying that this is because they haven’t found irrefutable evidence of life on other planets. He also places some blame on himself and his fellow scientists for being too afraid of their own emotionality and sticking so closely to the science when talking to the press. But for all Lee’s handwringing about how the true significance of their work wasn’t fully understood, it’s hard to say that “Starman” does a better job of it. If the media didn’t properly report on the significance of the work, then what was it? If Lee was able to answer that question, “Starman” could have been one of the most fascinating documentaries in recent years. But his answer is buried so deep beneath stories of his friendships with Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, detailed anecdotes about finding a proper landing site for the first Mars probe, and musings on the relationship between science fiction and reality that it ends up getting completely lost.
Lee is a fascinating guy with many great stories to tell, but in trying to say all of them in one under-90-minute package, “Starman” loses its purpose. The film saves any mention of Lee’s second career as an author until twenty minutes from the credits (his work on Sagan’s landmark “Cosmos” television series is relegated to a mere couple of sentences), and then out of nowhere, gives its final ten minutes over to his feelings on global warming. While it’s hard to argue with the sentiment (even though Stone gilds the lily far too much with Gary Lionelli’s insistent score), it feels out of place with the story the film tries to tell, even as convoluted as it is.
Gentry Lee deserves a documentary; that much is certain. Had “Starman” found more of a throughline for his life, had other interview subjects talk about him, challenged some of his assertions, or truly limited itself to an exploration of humanity’s search for life on other planets as seen through his eyes, it could have approached the stratosphere. As it is, it’s trying to do far too much in far too little time in a clear failure to launch.
