The Astronaut Farmer(2007)- User Reviews

I thought it was a great movie with a great message to viewers. One man builds a rocket in his back yard and blasts himself into orbit around the earth.

I'd like to clarify a few major misunderstandings by the author of the "Plausability, we have a problem!" review. In a sense I guess I'll review his review, haha. I'll ignore the petty opinions and get strait to the misleading parts. Like this one:

"This movie is not a parody, but rather a drama that has the audacity to suggest that one man (in a matter of a few years) can single-handedly plan, design, build and fly a machine that, in real life, took thousands of talented and dedicated engineers, scientists, astronauts and countless other professionals millions of people-hours to do a few decades ago."

The millions of people hours and billions of dollars spent by our hard working professionals at NASA where not spent trying to fly a space ship around Earth, they were spent trying to figure out how to do that - along with a million other questions they hadn't answers to. Once they knew what they were doing all that was left was to build the ship and they crank those puppies out like hot cakes now a days, with the knowledge they already have. The ships they build don’t simply orbit the Earth a couple times either, they fly to Jupiter and Mars. They land on other planets and take samples to bring back to Earth. All Billy Bob wants to do is fly around the Earth one time. Also, Billy Bob didn't do it in a few years he spent his whole life doing it. He was trained by NASA. It was his lifetime dream. That was the whole theme of the movie and the name of the space ship "The Dreamer" was a runoff of that. He also based the design off of a rocket used by NASA, which basically only leaves him with the task of building it - hardly an easy thing, but not impossible to do by ones self and family if you dedicate your life to it as he did.

And then I'll jump strait to this comment:

"but there were countless technical errors that engineers and scientists are probably still shaking their heads over days after seeing this joke of a film."

But the author doesn't mention what these errors were or even give an example. This sounds like an assumption to me.

The moral of the story is that we should all open up our eyes and attempt something challenging. Imagine if we all had dreams of even a fraction of the audacity Billy Bob had. The idea that one person, and not just a particular one person, but you or I, could accomplish something so grand and history making - there is an old saying that comes to mind: "Imagine what you would attempt, if you knew you wouldn't fail".

I recommend seeing this movie for anyone - particularly those who see themselves as a being that is acted on by the universe, and not as a being that acts on the universe. People have done extraordinary things; our history books are full of them.