BLAST!
Dir: Paul Devlin
Rating: 3.0
Paul Devlin Productions
74 Minutes
"Welcome to Astrophysics Indiana Jones Style!" says the hyperbolic tagline on my DVD screener of the documentary BLAST! It's not too far off: a team of scientists travel from Sweden to polar Canada and ultimately to Antarctica to effectively send up a balloon carrying a new kind of telescope that will take photos of space to help figure out the formation of the universe's galaxies. Unlike the average Spielberg pulp adventure, there's never any sense of danger except that the telescope might fall off of the balloon.
Then again, a documentary doesn't necessarily need that immediate sense of danger. The only danger in The King of Kong is that Steve Wiebe might not achieve his goal of getting a world record in Donkey Kong. Rather, the key to BLAST! is the same vital element that made something as seemingly esoteric as The King of Kong so irresistible: the human element. We see the amount of effort the team has put into the expensive balloon telescope fail during an initial attempt. We see the effects of team leader Mark Devlin's absence from his family for nearly half a year. BLAST! does a reasonably effective job at putting a human face behind scientific endeavor.
Running at 74 minutes, BLAST! feels scant on character development. Director Paul Devlin takes care to paint a picture of his brother Mark as a man of science following in his father's footsteps even if it means being away from his wife and kids, but the rest of the subjects fall by the wayside, presumably because it was much easier for the filmmaker to delve into his brother's life than those of complete strangers. Lazy.
Throughout the film I wondered about the other crew members. Surely these globetrotting grad students, no matter how devoted, had feelings about going all the way to Antarctica to send up a makeshift satellite after the first one failed so miserably. A gag reel runs alongside the credits, showing some of the lighter moments of the endeavor, especially from some of these other crew members. Perhaps putting a few of these in the film would have fleshed things out a bit more. Considering that the film stops to give a minute for the team's Inuit polar bear spotter to explain himself and how things have changed in his village (but not necessarily for the better), I'm sure Devlin could have given us a bit more.
One of the few crew members we do get acquainted with -- one of Mark's peers, Barth Netterfield -- a devout Catholic who believes that science is another way to know God: by studying His work. The film makes vague hints of Mark and Barth being at odds ideologically, but never explores this potentially illuminating dichotomy. Rather, BLAST! mostly treats Netterfield's religiosity as a weird anomaly or, worse yet, a quirk.
Scientifically speaking, BLAST! is fairly easy on the brain -- slightly more concerned with depicting the endeavor of getting that balloon up in the air than educating the audience. It doesn't totally eschew the science in favor of entertainment, but it doesn't communicate anything particularly complex. Much of its educational segments are rendered in hideously cheesy computer generated animations, but I'll allow BLAST! to live with this failing. It means well.
So much of BLAST! reeks of an attempt to make an entertaining science film with appeal to those who cringe at the sound of the word "education," but it ultimately fails at reaching for the depths it only casually grasps at. It rests firmly in that annoyingly middling realm where it doesn't give me anything cool I could take notes on for later misuse in superhero comics, nor does it give me enough character to understand the scientist behind the experiment and give me a new perspective on what have historically been those fellows in white coats who get eaten by the aliens at the beginning of a sci-fi flick. Admittedly, much of my disappointment with it can be blamed on Werner Herzog, whose Encounters at the End of the World depicted the strange personalities of researchers in Antarctica -- and even features the same research base. So I can watch Encounters for a look at the people behind the science. I can watch something like Carl Sagan's Cosmos for the hard science I crave. Where does that leave BLAST!?
by Danny Djeljosevic