Movie Review: "The Dish"
We rented "The Dish" through NetFlix and watched it this afternoon, and I must tell you that we were very pleasantly surprised.
This Australian-made movie is an unpretentious and refreshing look at man's proudest scientific achievement: the moonlanding and walk that took place in 1969. The fact that the film was made in Australia is important, as the perspective of the story comes from the radio telescope installation in the middle of a "sheep paddock" located outside of Parkes, Australia. Most of the signal for the 1969 television broadcast of the moonwalk came to the world via the Parkes dish.
The movie stars Sam Neill ("Jurassic Park"), Patrick Warburton ("Men in Black II," "Seinfeld") and an Australian cast which hits absolutely perfect notes for every character in every situation. This movie succeeds in being charming, funny, suspenseful, poignant and uplifting. It skillfully weaves actual radio and television coverage into the live action, and the scientific detail is spot-on, without being overwhelming.
I don't know how we missed this movie when it was released in 2000; it perhaps never made it to Midland. But, in this case, better late than never. I recommend it for the entire family...with one caveat: there's some occasional coarse language, and one totally unneccesary occurrence of the f-word. Otherwise, this could have been one of the best PG or perhaps even G-rated live action movies ever made.
(Incidentally, the review on IMDB [see link, above] points out that NASA had the moonwalk broadcast on a six second delay, in case anything went wrong. I'm sure there are many who would vote for letting NASA handle future Super Bowl halftime broadcasts!)
If you enjoyed this, you should try and find a copy of "the Castle", which was the first film made by the same group of people. I don't know what the release was like in the US, and it is more blatantly Australian, but quality viewing.
Posted by: dan at February 8, 2004 05:32 PMDan, thanks for the recommendation; we'll try to track down a copy.
There's an interesting thread on IMDB about the movie, and how the DVD version was edited to make it "less Aussie" and thus, apparently, more understandable for us Ahmuricuns. That gets to the heart of your "blatantly Australian" comment, I suppose. I hate to see that sort of editing take place, but I also understand some of the motivation. Neither of my parents, for example, would be able to fully enjoy "The Dish" because their ears just aren't tuned to the Aussie speech patterns and vernacular (they could always turn on the subtitles, I guess).
But movies like "Strictly Ballroom" (one of our favorites) just wouldn't be the same without the obscure references (and I suspect that it was pretty Americanized right out of the box).
Posted by: Eric at February 8, 2004 06:10 PMNow that's funny - I was going to recommend Strictly Ballroom as a wholly Australian movie that I found adorable.
Posted by: jen at February 9, 2004 07:52 PMJen, I always knew you had impeccable tastes! ;-)
Posted by: Eric at February 9, 2004 07:55 PMAbout the publisher
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I saw The Dish on video when it came out. I thought it was just as you describe - charming. Just seeing that you liked it makes me smile.
Posted by: jen at February 7, 2004 05:49 PM