Return to Space (2022)

Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who previously scaled a rock with Alex Honnold, now scale a launchpad with Elon Musk. Their subject is the two-decade campaign to return NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a privately built capsule. The film is well made, plainly admiring, and structured like a corporate anniversary reel that happens to contain genuine archival wonder. Rockets rise. Men in polo shirts watch monitors. A narrator explains the stakes in the tone of a shareholder letter.

The cast is drawn from the actual workforce, which means the film is populated by women and people of color in serious engineering and administrative roles: Gwynne Shotwell running operations, Lori Garver speaking for NASA, astronauts' spouses holding the domestic line during long deployments. None of this is framed as an argument. The camera simply records who was in the room, and the room was more varied than the mythology of the lone billionaire genius suggests. Credit where it is due, though the credit belongs to SpaceX's hiring, not to the filmmakers' conscience.

On every other front, the film is silent. No environmental reckoning, no racial reckoning, no interrogation of the fortune or the man behind it. Musk's own public remarks about his neurology go unmentioned, which spares the film a theme it never wanted. Reviews at the time called it an exasperating commercial, and the shoe fits: it sells a company and calls the sale inspiration. We are left with a competent portrait of ambition, faintly instructive about persistence, entirely uninterested in discomfort. There is a place for such films. That place is an airplane screen at thirty thousand feet, somewhere over Nebraska, with the sound off.