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Ryan White

Amazon Prime

IT IS hard not to fall in love with Good Night Oppy, Ryan White’s stirring documentary about the interplanetary rover Opportunity. The vehicle launched into space on 7 July 2003, a few weeks after its sister machine, Spirit, and the pair landed on different sides of Mars in January 2004.

NASA expected both to live for just 90 sols, or Martian days, each about 39 minutes longer than an Earth day. Instead, thanks to solar-powered panels and precise manoeuvring, the delightfully nicknamed Oppy survived for over 14 years. Spirit, however, only made it for six years and 77 days.

During this time, Oppy made some startling discoveries about the history of water on Mars. NASA researchers hope its findings will provide some lessons we can learn from on Earth, and ultimately help us discover whether the Red Planet ever had life.

Key to Good Night Oppy‘s success is how quickly White creates a connection between the audience and the rover, especially during the film’s first few minutes. Not only do we see that Oppy stands at a human-like 1.6 metres tall and has cameras that look like eyeballs, we are also told that it has a mind of its own and needs to feel love. Later on, we learn that Oppy struggles with joint and memory problems just like us.

White edits this information and footage together in such a smart and entertaining manner that we are instantly hooked. Especially when we discover that NASA’s engineers would start every day of their expeditions by playing a song to get Oppy and the crew pumped, including Born to Be Wild.

Music plays a major role in keeping us connected to Oppy. In some scenes it is rousing, in others melancholic. At one point, we are treated to dark humour, as a scientist plays Abba’s SOS while they wait nervously to hear a signal from their metallic colleague.

The NASA members White interviews are also essential to building an emotional bond between the audience and Oppy. Their affection for it, which they all openly admit is a little bizarre, is clearly heartfelt – so much so that it quickly becomes contagious and you can’t help but root for this tiny spacecraft all alone, over 86 million kilometres from Earth.

Good Night Oppy is really as much an animated movie as it is a documentary. White and the team at Industrial Light & Magic, the film special effects company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, use animated sequences to recreate Oppy’s journey through space, its landing on Mars and its bumpy expedition across the planet’s surface. It is so invigorating that it feels like watching the best Pixar movie never made. But forget comparisons to Pixar’s animated sci-fi WALL-E – one of the film’s severe dust storms is more reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road.

Without these animated sequences, Good Night Oppy wouldn’t be anywhere near as engaging. They help us to gauge just how dangerous it was for Oppy to climb over a sizeable rock, dig itself out of a deep bank of sand and traverse the side of the Victoria and Endeavour craters on Mars. With the help of the interviews and voice-overs, we get a real sense of the peril involved. Just one tiny mistake could have ended transmission to Oppy permanently.

There would probably be just enough in Oppy’s plight to make Good Night Oppy a riveting watch on its own. But its exploration of why NASA goes to Mars and its honesty about the complex, emotional relationship that people build with inanimate machines brings a depth to Good Night Oppy that makes it all the more thought-provoking, moving and inspiring.

Gregory Wakeman is a writer based in Los Angeles, California