Wild Wild Space: Rooster Behavior in Space – VARA Guide

Documentary filmmaker Ross Kaufman follows two space entrepreneurs battling for dominance in the skies with their rockets in a nearly non-critical film.

Stanley Kubrick has already done it: he captured a space story in opera form. Check it out. 2001: Space Odyssey (1968). Oscar-winner Ross Kaufman takes a similar approach to his documentary about the private battles for space, with plenty of high-quality synthesized music. The film follows space entrepreneurs and computer geeks Chris Kemp and Peter Beck, who compete with each other in this era of privatized space travel. Kaufman portrays them not necessarily as idealists who want the best for the world, but as cowboys, with the rockets they build as their proud penises.

The film basically shows the behavior of a rooster. The idea that men want to be the best. Second place is worth nothing. You can say: with such a mentality, you are not helping the Earth. And that is not their goal: they want to exploit the universe. At the beginning of the film, someone already hints at a future, when the structure of human life will be determined by a select number of influential tech wizards. As it is, see Elon Musk. Governments are putting power in the hands of isolated people who are not known for their philanthropy, to say the least.

As a documentary filmmaker, you can let your moral compass do the talking, but Kaufman doesn’t do that enough, and seems to admire the wild ambitions of his subjects. The critique comes off as just a sideshow and feels perfunctory. In the past, you had brilliant inventors who were busy improving the world in pursuit of utopia. In wild space It shows how capitalism will forever be the dominant factor. And since Mother Earth has already been widely marketed, we still have a paradise to market. It’s a message that has been heard for decades in feature films and documentaries.

Wild Wild Space, starting Thursday, July 18, 2024 on HBO Max