Always grist for the mills of the minds of youthful moviegoers is any probing of the unknown, any dabbling in the mysteries of the partially known, or any adventure that crosses the borderline between the probable and the merely possible. The current Twentieth Century Fox release Spacecamp is indeed such an adventure, and children everywhere are relishing it in untold numbers.
There's a very logical fascination with every new frontier and the unexplained that lies beyond. Some have called space the final frontier, but they're exuberantly wrong. There will always be as many "final frontiers" as there have been past frontiers as there have been past frontiers, and space is only the frontier of the moment. Speakers and thinkers in any age are always convinced that their discoveries are the ultimate, yet something always emerges that supersedes and brings new hopes and new challenges, and those become the stuff that movie dreams are made of. Whatever is trendy, whatever is camp, is in, and Spacecamp's space camp is no exception. It's on the cutting edge of every kid's imagination, and imagination is still really the only true magic carpet for fantasy-minded children - or fantasy - minded adults, for that mater.
In the early years of this century the Tom Swift books were devoured by young readers. Consider such mysterious dabbling as Tom Swift and His Airship, Tom Swift and His Motorcycle, or Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat, all copyrighted in 1910 and all exploring those then new and very exciting frontiers, together with all the magic that goes with that sort of thing.
By 1928 it was Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures; by 1933 it was… His Television Detector, and by 1934…His Ocean Airport, at a time when aircraft carriers were barely a dream. If the series were published today, I would envision Tom Swift and His Space Shuttle Adventure or the like, and that's exactly what we have in the entertaining and gripping film Spacecamp. It's many notches above Our Gang Blasts Off, but in essence the identical appeal is all there.
The story is based on the existence of the elaborate summer programs offered to kids ages eleven to seventeen at the NASA Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama. (There's a small similar camp in Hutchinson, Kansas, but the film is set at the original location of Huntsville, and almost all of it was shot at that particular camp.) The idea of such a space camp, together with a space museum, was the brainchild of the late German scientist, Wernher von Braun. Today over 4,000 youngsters "graduate" each year from the program, with double that number anticipated by next year. At the camp, the science-minded youth train in conditions of weightlessness, work in the "five degrees of freedom" chair used to train astronauts for space walks, operate the MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit, a robot arm), and undergo mock emergency procedures in simulate flight conditions in a replica of a space capsule. It's the dream of thousands of today's boys and girls, and the movie makes it a vicarious reality for the viewers.
The story begins as the summer crop of kids arrives at the camp, managed by astronauts Tom Skerritt (who started in Top Gun) and Kate Capshaw (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). The main group is cutely contrived, and in today's usual attempts at apparent ethnic and racial heterogeneity, the mix, though possible, is atypical. We have two teenage girls. On is demure and brilliant: Lea Thompson (Back to
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