Release date: August 4, 2000 

Grumpy old men… In space.

Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner, James Cromwell, Marcia Gay Harden and William Devane. Can you smell the Bengay, Goldbold and hard candy?

No, it’s not The Oscars post party. It’s Space Cowboys staring a Canadian (metric) poop-ton of Oscar caliber talent  in a film about old dudes flying into space to fix a satellite too old for the young blood at NASA to fix. Oh and it has a song specially written for the soundtrack by N*SYNC. Yeah… Sound great until there. BUT we can ignore it.

But seriously, in the year 2000 The russians went to NASA to ask for help in fixing a “communications” satellite that had begun to fail. They didn’t want to just let it fall back to earth because it was an important symbol to the Russian people. The hitch lays in the fact that the programming language and technology we beyond outdated. Luckily for them, the creator (Eastwood) of the programming language is still alive. The catch? He wants to go up with his crew  to fix it. A crew that was promised to be the first men in space, but were traded in for a monkey when NASA replaced the air-force. Old men jokes ensure! What NASA and the grandpas don’t know is that cute little comms satellite from Russia isn’t carrying love. More like a bunch of nuclear warheads. Jerks, I know. So it’s up to the gang to save the world!

WHAT WORKED:

– The acting. Not much of a surprise there. You have a Noah’s Arc worth of talent. They used it. Shining star being Tommy Lee Jones again.

– The pace. Sitting at 130 minutes, Space Cowboys wastes no second of it. Pushing the story forward with the main story and subplot involving Jones’ predicaments.

– The story. Old men in space save the world.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK:

– The voice overs for the young men playing the cast in the flashback opening. Holy crap nuggets in a coach handbag that was horrible! What I have learned from listening to Kevin Smith’s DVD commentaries and Podcasts is that our voices are ever changing. No own sounds the same at age 20 and age 70. And it just sounds bad. Eastwood should have done what they did for Men In Black 3 and cast actors who can imitate the guys or at least copy speech mannerisms. Other than that this film worked damn fine. Not like most of these guys’ prostates nowadays. #IKid.

THE LOWDOWN:

This is a good little 60 million dollar movie. I didn’t mention that it was directed by Eastwood himself because it doesn’t feel like an Eastwood film. It has his pacing all over it. But the look was something different for him at the time. Space Cowboys is like that quiet girl in your class. You know that girl who’s name you don’t know but is kinda cute? Well this girl is like 7th in the class and does nothing bad. Space Cowboys is 80% Prime Awesome.