The launch in October 1957 by the Soviet Union of Sputnik One, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, had a profound effect upon American morale at the beginning of Eisenhower’s second term in the White House. It punctured the prevailing complacency, brought into question the ascendency of US technology and the efficiency of the national educational system, and led to both the space race and the election of John F. Kennedy. The event also excited a sense of wonder similar to, though less anxious than, that aroused by the first atom bomb 12 years before. This is the context of Joe Johnston’s engaging and moving October Sky.
Recently, A Walk on the Moon touched on the oblique influence on terrestrial life of Apollo 11. October Sky deals more directly with Sputnik’s effects, and it is largely a true story that was told by the Nasa engineer Homer Hickam Jr in an article in the Smithsonian Magazine and expanded into his touching memoir Rocket Boys. The director Joe Johnson has spent most of his adult life engaged in movie special effects, working mainly for George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, and you can see what attracted him to Homer and his friends.
In 1957 the 17-year-old Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a high-school student in Coalwood, a small coal-mining town in the mountains of West Virginia where the land, the shops and the local railroad are all owned by the same company. It is a grimy place registered in bleak, lowering images where the only jobs are provided underground by an industry that’s both dangerous and dying. If you manage to survive a major disaster or the loss of a limb, unemploy ment or black lung disease will inevitably strike. Homer’s brother is escaping with a football scholarship, but Homer, an indifferent scholar and athlete, will follow his father John (Chris Cooper) into the pit.
Dad, though, is no ordinary miner – he’s the superintendent, tough, respected, an anti-union man whose values have been shaped by his family’s traditional calling. He can only respect a man prepared to do a hard day’s graft at the coal face, though Homer’s mother (Natalie Canerday) has always wanted something better for her boys. For Homer, Sputnik is an inspiration. With the encouragement of a young science teacher (Laura Dern), he and three friends, one of them a clever, bespectacled geek from the neighbourhood’s poorest home, start building rockets. The first ones are little more than fireworks, but they become more sophisticated as the lads study technology and experiment with moonshine liquor as fuel. At the end of the trail lies a state science fair, and then a national one, with the possibility of university scholarships.
Homer and his team get assistance from mine workers eager to see the boys realise their dreams. Girls suddenly take an interest in imaginative swots rather than muscular jocks. But other people are less helpful. The police intervene when an off-course rocket is held responsible for a forest fire. An oppressive school principal tells the science teacher: “Our job is to give them an education, not to give them false hopes.” Above all Homer’s father, superbly played by Chris Cooper, remains implacable, and when he’s injured in an underground accident, Homer has to go down the mine for a whole year to feed the family.
Some of the telescoping of events – the simultaneous occurrence of a strike, the theft of a rocket attachment, and the science teacher being treated for Hodgkin’s disease – results in near melodrama and the picture is not without its sentimental moments. But it is a marvellous, inspiring story about hope springing up in a harsh community with little to look forward to.
It is rather like a feel-good version of Kes that ends with the young falcon-fancier becoming an ornithologist and working for the World Wild Life Foundation. Anyway, for much of October Sky I had a lump in my throat and at the end there were tears in my eyes.