October Sky (1999)

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Rating: PG
Director: Joe Johnston
Writers: Homer Hickam Jr., Lewis Colick
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern
Release Date: February 19, 1999 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

In October 1957, news of the Soviet Union‘s launch of Sputnik 1 reaches Homer Hickam in the mining community of Coalwood, West Virginia, who is inspired to build his own rockets despite the skepticism of his friends and family, especially his father; John Hickam, who strictly wanted Homer to work in the mines.

Homer teams up with math geek Quentin Wilson, who shares an interest in aerospace engineering; with the support of friends Roy Lee Cooke and Sherman O’Dell, and their science teacher Freida J. Riley, they construct small rockets. When one of their rockets lands near John’s office and nearly injures some workers, John reprimands Homer not to build rockets on his property again. The boys hike to the edge of the coal company’s property, where they succeed with the help of the townsfolk, including the mine’s machine shop manager, Ike Bykovsky, who is punished by John for helping the boys and sent to work in the mine.

The rocket launches begin attracting townsfolk. However, the boys abandon rocketry after they are accused by the military of starting a wildfire with a stray rocket and are arrested. In a mining accident, John is injured and Bykovsky is killed, devastating Homer. He drops out of high school to work in the mine and provide for his family while his father recovers.

Homer is inspired by Miss Riley to read a book on applied rocket science, learning to calculate the trajectory of a rocket. Using this, he and Quentin locate their missing rocket and prove it could not have caused the fire. The boys present their findings to Miss Riley and the school principal, Mr. Turner, who determines the cause was a flare from a nearby airfield. Homer tells his father he is returning to high school and no longer wants to work in the mine. The boys return to rocketry and win the school science fair. When the opportunity arises for one of them to participate in the National Science Fair in Indianapolis, they elect Homer. The miner’s union goes on strike against the coal company. With the mines set to close and resenting his father’s pressures, Homer storms out of the house, vowing never to return.

At the National Science Fair, Homer’s display is well-received. Overnight, someone steals his machined rocket part model – the de Laval nozzle – and his autographed picture of Dr. Wernher von Braun. Homer makes an urgent phone call home to his mother Elsie, who implores John to end the strike so that Mr. Bolden, Bykovsky’s replacement, can use the machine shop to build a replacement nozzle. John relents when Elsie, fed up with his lack of support for their son, threatens to leave him. With the town’s support and replacement parts sent to Indianapolis, the boys win the top prize and Homer is bombarded with college scholarship offers.

He returns to Coalwood as a hero and visits Miss Riley, who is dying of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Preparing for the launch of their largest rocket yet, Homer asks his father to come and tells him that Von Braun is brilliant but is not his hero—implying John is his true idol. At the launch of their rocket, named for Miss Riley, almost all of Coalwood turns out to watch. John is given the honor of pushing the launch button. The Miss Riley reaches an altitude of 30,000 feet (9,100 m) – higher than the summit of Mount Everest. As the town looks to the skies, John puts his hand on Homer’s shoulder and smiles, showing Homer that he is proud of him.

An epilogue reveals the real-life outcomes of the main characters’ lives, noting that Miss Riley died, the mine closed, and all four Rocket Boys went to college, going on to successful careers, with Homer working at NASA.

My Review:

October Sky is the biopic of NASA engineer Homer Hickam Jr., based on a memoir he originally published in 1998. The movie’s title is an anagram of the book’s original title, “Rocket Boys.” Apparently the movie studio back in the late 1990s didn’t think women would go see a movie called “Rocket Boys,” so the name was changed to something with broader appeal. The movie did well enough that later re-prints of Hickam’s book were renamed “October Sky” to capitalize of the movie’s success. The anagram worked as a title because the story was inspired by the boys’ sight of Sputnik in the October sky over West Virginia.

The story is a true one, based on Homer Hickam’s efforts to build a rocket as a high school student in the 1950s coal mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. Homer’s desire to build a rocket was not something his dad John wanted for him, as he believed it a waste of time. Homer and three friends persevered anyway, ultimately succeeding and winning a national science fair competition that launched Homer’s eventual career at NASA.

The movie painted a grim but true picture of the difficult and dangerous life associated with coal mining, along with a subtle look at the extent to which coal miners were treated badly by the companies for which they work. This point is made most obvious in the immediate aftermath of an injury to Homer’s father, which necessitated that Homer drop out of high school and go to work in the mines himself until his dad’s return to work.

More than rockets, coal mining, or anything else, October Sky is at its heart a movie about a father and son relationship. The rest of the story is just window dressing, though it’s great window dressing. The best moment of the film for me was when John Hickam (Chris Cooper) interrupted a beating that one of his son’s friends was getting, after the boys were arrested for accidentally starting a fire. We learn only later that the boys were innocent. For most of the movie, John and Homer were at odds over Homer’s rocket-building efforts, but this scene reminded us that Homer’s father was a good man who simply disagreed with his son, rather than a bad man who was an antagonist. The two continue to fight and argue right up until the national science fair when Homer’s mother finally presses John to help Homer. Like a lot of fathers and their sons, they both wanted to feel respected by each other. A lot of their friction was a sense of mutual hurt over wrongly perceived rejection by the other and thus the real story is how they overcame that. This is a normal dynamic even in the best father and son relationships, but the arc is done particularly well here with great performances from Gyllenhaal and Cooper.

The other really standout performance in the movie is from Laura Dern, who plays Homer’s teacher Miss Riley. She is the outside-his-family push that Homer needs to pursue his outside-the-family dream. The character and the real life Miss Riley both suffered from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, eventually dying from it. Riley tells Homer that she believes her life would have meant something if one of her students won the national science fair and went on to do something great with his life. This motivates Homer to take the final steps to make this a reality. First a motivated Homer proves with math and science that his group was innocent of starting the fire for which they were wrongly accused earlier. Then he and the other Rocket Boys, with their equipment returned to them from the police, go on to win the national science fair and the college scholarships that accompany the victory.

October Sky is a beautifully shot film and the score is excellent. It’s not a long movie, but the pacing was such that the runtime absolutely flies by. The movie is rated PG, but I would be careful showing this to younger kids. There’s probably just a little too much bad language for smaller kids, and a couple of the accident scenes at the coal mine might also be too much to process – though it is not handled gratuitously in any way.

I actually found this story in a somewhat strange way. A few years ago, a Twitter exchange involving Hickam – who is still alive and well – went very viral and I saw it. After getting a NASA internship, a young woman named Naomi was so excited that she used some pretty vulgar language when celebrating the moment. Homer tweeted at her, “language,” which then led to even more foul language directed at him, because she apparently did not know who he was. I didn’t know who he was either, and looked into it and found this book and movie. Hickam might have been more understanding of her mistake than most because he also experienced meeting a NASA legend (Wernher von Braun in his case) without realizing it until later.

Overall, this is a really good movie. It’s very well acted, it tells a great father-son story that is both moving and inspiring, and the whole thing is true – which is always more fun. I definitely recommend it.

Have you seen October Sky? If so, what did you think?