‘Good Night Oppy’ documentary review: A moving story of twin rovers

While Ryan White’s documentary is about the rovers and the advancements in astronomy, it also has echoes of the human desire to explore our loneliness

The subject of Ryan White’s latest documentary is the Mars Exploration Rovers; a pair of twin rovers named Opportunity and Spirit that played a pivotal role in exploring the red planet. The rovers designed to last a total of 90 days take a life of their own, surpassing initial expectations, with Opportunity surviving for a total of 15 years on Mars braving dust storms and solar flares to relay photographs of the neighbouring planet to the scientists at NASA.

While the documentary is about the rovers and the advancements in astronomy, it also has echoes of the human desire to explore our loneliness and this is conveyed in the very beginning. The project manager, while laying out the aims of the MER mission, notes that the objective is to explore the possibility of life having existed outside the blue planet, and adds that finding water is a key determinant to reaching the answer.

It gets rather existential once we learn in an interview with the director that the documentary only sprung to life after Opportunity’s death, gifting the filmmakers a ready three-act script to work on for which Ryan admits to writing the screenplay, something he hadn’t done for his previous documentaries.

Good Night Oppy is a mixture of animation, interviews and archival footage from NASA. In these interviews, we find scientists and engineers at NASA using gendered pronouns while talking about the rovers; they treat them like their family members with some going as far as comparing the birth of her children to the journey of these rovers. The rovers like humans also seem to have colourful personalities; Spirit is the troublemaker while Opportunity is the obedient child who grows up to become a teacher’s pet. As the film progresses, these solar-powered, remote-controlled rovers start looking human to us, standing 5’2” tall with wide-set eyes and a slender metal frame who seem to enjoy music with a special liking to songs by Abba.

Over the course of the documentary, we also watch Spirit and Opportunity navigate harsh weather conditions of cosmic proportions, and are bound to be invested and root for their survival on an alien planet. Like the scientists, we start to understand the rovers better by the minute, all thanks to the clean photo real animation by Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ company). Ryan does a stellar job at compressing a 15-year-long story into 90 minutes giving us the illusion that the rovers have had an eventful day. But as we near the end, the imminent death of these rovers starts to become too real and weighs heavy on the heart. The rovers, like humans, start having issues with memory as they age and their joints start getting brittle. Scientists on Earth liken these phenomena to arthritis and Alzheimer’s. Opportunity’s final message: “My battery is low and it is getting dark in here,” is bound to move viewers to tears.

The rovers could only communicate through text on-screen, but in Good Night Oppy, Ryan employs Angela Bassett’s voice to tug at our heartstrings; her voiceover is another step towards turning these rovers human.

The cherry on top of this moving documentary is the amount of quality archival footage by NASA. We, as the audience, are taken into the rooms and labs that birthed these rovers and understand the hard work, passion and scientific temper that went into making this mission possible. In Opportunity and Spirit’s death, the mission is passed on to Perseverance almost like a torch to keep the human spirit alive and burning on the neighbouring planet.