Rent The Right Stuff (1983)

Rocket Fuel and Self-Regard - The Right Stuff review by griggs

Some films don’t just tell you a story — they stand up, square their shoulders, and salute themselves mid-scene. This one can be a bit like that: big, hearty, pro-America myth-making, delivered with such craft you almost forgive the occasional whiff of self-congratulation.

It’s also seriously well made. The flying sequences have that clean, physical snap modern CGI sometimes forgets, and the whole thing has the confidence of a movie that knows it’s building a national legend. The trouble is it keeps building it. At a certain point the runtime starts to feel like endurance training, which is thematically appropriate but not always thrilling as a viewer.

Still, I had a good time with it. You can see its fingerprints all over later crowd-pleasers — the cockpit bravado of Top Gun, the wide-eyed awe that eventually fuels films like Interstellar. The Right Stuff is impressive, enjoyable, and just a touch too pleased with itself.

A good story, well told. - The Right Stuff review by ND

I love this film. It's long, 3 hours, but it never drags. The actors are all good, as are their performances. If you like aircraft, adventure and just plain going fast, you'll love it.

Epic & Thoroughly Entertaining Drama - The Right Stuff review by GI

This epic film is a sheer delight throughout its extended running time. A film that is about adventure, history and magic as well as taking a humorous and critical look at American media controlled politics. Director Philip Kaufman has taken real events, adapted a highly readable book about them and imbued the film with high drama, laughs and some mysticism occasionally throwing in a touch of surrealism for good measure. He also manages very cleverly to poke fun at America and especially its political ideals whilst celebrating the triumphs depicted. In short this is the story of America's innovations in aircraft just after the Second World War and through to the 'space race' and the Mercury astronaut program that preceded the Apollo missions. It starts with the story of the attempts to break the sound barrier and focuses on Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard). Set at a remote Californian desert airbase the wild country matches the wild animalistic test aircraft that the pilots have to fly often dying in the process. In this part of the film Kaufman introduces us to the family pressures involved and links to a new breed of younger pilots who go onto join the space program. The cast are mightily impressive including Ed Harris as John Glen, Scott Glenn as Alan Shepherd and Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid, Lance Henricksen and many others. There are many standout and highly memorable scenes including Yeager's walk out of the desert after a crash, Glen's first orbit of the Earth, the mystical dance of the Australian aborigines and Vice President Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) having a temper tantrum when one of the astronaut's wives refuses to be interviewed with him. What an absolutely marvellous film, it's thoroughly entertaining throughout and if you enjoyed First Man (2018) then The Right Stuff can be viewed as a kind of prequel to that. If you've never seen this then I highly recommend it, it's a real gem.