Opportunity is quite a character. I’m talking about the star of Ryan White’s crowd-pleasing, Oscar-tipped documentary Good Night Oppy: a Nasa-engineered rover sent on a 90-day mission to Mars in 2003 that surprisingly stretched to 15 years.
Opportunity, or Oppy as some affectionately call her for short, is a melange of wheels, wires, antennas and solar panels that come together with traits familiar to humans. She has a neck that looks retrofitted from a kitchen sink drainpipe. And her head has cameras spread horizontally in binocular formation like eyes. And when the rover – in an early scene from Good Night Oppy – halts before what she assumes to be a Martian obstruction but turns out to be her own shadow, we can’t help but attribute a comical personality to her.
Oppy looks and occasionally acts like Wall-E, the adorable trash compactor from the 2008 Pixar movie tasked with cleaning up the Earth after humans left our planet as a red dust-covered wasteland. Good Night Oppy’s director White has heard that before. He smiles knowingly on a Zoom call from Los Angeles, admitting that his film has been referred to as the documentary answer to the Pixar movie, though the formulation should be the other way around. “Nasa’s very careful to point out that Spirit and Opportunity came first,” he says.
White welcomes the comparison. Nasa rovers like Spirit and Oppy clearly inspired Wall-E and the Pixar movie in turn was an inspiration on Good Night Oppy, a doc mixing archival footage of Nasa engineers working on the ground with CGI recreations of what both Oppy and Spirit got up to on Mars.
White’s documentary often feels in conversation with movies from the past that stir childlike wonder and bring these stories about science and space exploration down to earth with humour and pathos. The relationship is right there on its poster. Good Night Oppy is produced by Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin Entertainment. Their logo positions ET, the lovable alien from Spielberg’s 80s classic, in the stars above Opportunity.
“ET was my favorite film growing up,” says White, a self-proclaimed space nerd whose previous documentaries on tennis player Serena Williams and sexpert Dr Ruth were about extraordinary personalities who remained earthbound. He explains that Spielberg’s ET provided him with direction for shaping a story around a machine whose sole purpose is to study space rocks. “It’s a film about a non-human character that hopefully the audience will bond with or feel this emotional attachment with. And then at the end of the film, you have to say goodbye to that character. It’s sad, but it’s also very hopeful.”
Amblin, alongside Peter Berg’s company Film 45, approached White with this project in 2020, two years after Oppy’s final transmission from Mars reporting a low battery and dark skies. Producers at Amblin and Film45 had secured Nasa’s cooperation and access to the mission archives. White pitched the idea of not just relying on the archives and talking head interviews to tell Spirit and Opportunity’s story, but to build a narrative using CGI that would put audiences on Mars alongside the two rovers. The film-maker argues that that was the only way to really do justice to a daring mission that – as his documentary narrates with riveting play-by-plays – had way too many opportunities to fail. “If we’re going to make a film about this incredibly innovative and daring mission,” says White, “we should be representing that in the film as well, and not totally playing it safe in a sort of educational DVD type of way. Let’s try something really bold.”
White says he made that pitch over dinner with Amblin and Film 45 on 12 March 2020. The day after, on 13 March, Trump declared Covid-19 a national emergency in the US. The world shut down but that didn’t have a detrimental impact on Good Night Oppy since so much of the documentary was going to be made with archival footage and visual effects rendered by artists working remotely from all over the world. They were making a movie that takes us as far as science can reach at a time when our orbits were reduced to the space between home and the grocery store.
To recreate Mars, Amblin connected the film-maker to Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the visual effects company formed by George Lucas in 1975 to make Star Wars. That’s just another strand in Good Night Oppy’s shared DNA with sci-fi movie history.
ILM had never attempted photoreal recreations of Mars before, but according to White they had the data from Nasa to be as authentic as they could in Good Night Oppy. The sun’s direction, the tint in the sky and the level of dust would be accurate to the exact moment being rendered as Opportunity and Spirit roam the red planet collecting rocks, getting stuck in quicksand or shutting down to brave dust storms and deep freezes.
The film is also very self-aware that data collection, science and accurate images of a desert planet are not interesting to an audience without a narrative hook. “Try to explain gamma ray spectroscopy to an eight-year-old,” astronomer Steve Squyres says in the documentary as a challenge, before explaining how Spirit and Opportunity made Nasa’s work broadly appealing. The robots with their adorable Wall-E-like traits took on a life of their own in the public consciousness, long before lending Good Night Oppy an empathetic character to hang its narrative on.
That human connection comes across very easily in the film especially because the Nasa engineers would project so much emotionally on to the rovers, often describing Spirit and Oppy as though the robots are their kids. The engineers also tend to explain everything in human terms, like when a malfunction or system error is described as a cold or pneumonia.
“These robots are the stand-ins for these people,” says White, explaining how the engineers at Nasa were essentially living vicariously through the rovers because they can’t be digging through Martian rock themselves. “They inevitably project human qualities on to that robot.
“It’s not just emotion and sensibility. It’s also the design. They could have designed a robot in many different ways. They could have surely designed a robot that did not look like Short Circuit’s Johnny 5. But they did. They created a robot that’s lovable, adorable, has a face and has an arm. That wasn’t by accident. That’s by design.”
Good Night Oppy is in cinemas now and will stream on Amazon Prime on 23 November
