The Dish
Fly Me to the Moon
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” — John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962, Houston, TX
“I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations.” — George W. Bush, Oct. 11, 2000, Winston-Salem NC
On the surface, I suppose that these two statements from these two Presidents don’t mesh all that well, but they do. Kennedy’s challenge and Bush’s call for humility together mark how Americans view our triumphs in space and elsewhere; we are proud of our achievements but too modest and humble to call attention to them. Oh, sure, we call attention to ourselves in a million different ways, but for whatever reason, we tend to be modest about our scientific and technical prowess. Think about it. What got more public interest; the cracking of the human genome or the Britney Spears Pepsi commercial?
The Dish is an Australian movie about the Apollo 11 moon landing, and there you have it. There is no way at all that there could ever be an American movie about Apollo 11. The omnipresent Hollywood sense of cynicism and irony would be defenseless in the face of such an overpowering scientific triumph. The only good movie there has ever been or will ever likely be about the Apollo program was Ron Howard’s stirring Apollo 13, which, of course, was about a near-disaster.
So it is left up to the Australians to tell the definitive story of Apollo 11, and The Dish accomplishes that admirably well. It is the story of a radio telescope in the small boondock town of Parkes which is tasked to retrieve the television signals from the lunar lander. Three Australian technicians (Sam Neill, Kevin Harrington, Tom Long) and an expert from NASA (Patrick Warburton, from Seinfeld) were responsible for keeping the huge satellite dish pointed at Apollo 11 so that the TV coverage and the launch telemetry and other technical information can be transmitted to Mission Control in Houston.
Now this may sound… well… a little dull, and if you don’t believe me, check out the official story of what really happened at the Parkes telescope at: http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/. Here’s a represenative quote:
The horn for the off-axis receiver had a smooth circular cross-section with a flared tapered aperture, and a corrugation surrounding the aperture of the horn. The main receiver horn was the first experimental test bed corrugated horn which was used to verify the operation of a 2 hybrid-mode horn. This innovative, CSIRO designed feed horn increased the sensitivity and bandwidth of the receivers. It was originally designed to operate at 2700 MHz, which was a routine operating frequency in those days.
The Dish is nowhere near as dull as all that (although the constant picturesque views of the dish and the sheep and the montages of NASA stock footage and the vintage Sixties soundtrack can be a little wearying). On the contrary, it’s a sparkly, witty light comedy, full of gentle humor and good will. It’s a movie that is far more interested in poking gentle fun at its quirky ensemble cast than it is in just about anything else. Even the moon landing takes second place to the question of whether the tongue-tied young math geek will ask out the pretty girl who brings the sandwiches, or whether the visit of the Australian PM to Parkes will turn out well.
The Dish is a charming, cute, funny little movie that tries very hard to amuse and entertain, but I could not bring myself to love it. By the time of the moon landing, the tone shifts from light comedy into a profound, almost Spielbergian sense of wonder. (The movie’s “bookends”, lifted straight from Saving Private Ryan doesn’t help one bit.) There’s just too many shots of people getting all dewy-eyed at the TV screen and congratulating themselves on their role in Apollo 11 for comfort, and call me crazy, but I missed the Hollywood sense of irony and cynicism there for a moment.
Or maybe there’s more to it; maybe it’s not good for America to be reminded what we used to be capable of. Maybe there’s just too much of a contrast between the cheeriness of The Dish and the actual realities of a space program so hard up that it has to launch millionaires and Senators into space just to get any kind of attention at all. The Dish is a perfectly fine, funny movie, but you may walk away from it focused more on the last words of Tom Hanks in Apollo 13: “I sometimes catch myself looking up at the moon, remembering the changes of fortune in our long voyage, thinking of the thousands of people who worked to bring the three of us home. I look up at the moon, and wonder: When will we be going back? And who will that be?”