An average movie

Since this movie had been really poorly received, I wasn’t expecting much but since I have a weak spot for Natalie Portman, I was still eager to check it out. Actually, the fact that I was expecting to watch a really awful movie pretty much messed up my viewing since I was constantly expecting something really bad or stupid to happen at every corner. Well, to be honest, I don’t really get why this movie got such harsh reviews and poor ratings. Indeed, I thought it was such a fascinating story with another strong performance by Portman. Still, I’ll have to admit that it was far from being flawless though. First of all, the fact that they decided to deviate from the actual events led to some rather dubious artistical choices. For example, Lisa Nowak (the woman this story was based on) had actually 3 children but, instead, they gave her a niece who had her own really convoluted and completely half-baked backstory. Furthermore, since the niece never really did exist, there was really no reason why she should have been involved in Cola/Nowak’s wild chase. Eventually, the biggest failure was the fact that they never really convincingly displayed the link between her extra-marital affaire with another astronaut and her general mental meltdown following her return to Earth. Indeed, it was really interesting to see this brilliant and strong woman slowly losing her grip with reality after going through such a life changing event and it made sense that, the more she was obsessing about going back into outer space, the more erratic her behavior became and the less likely it was that she would ever go back there. However, how this all led to have sex with another astronaut and eventually even stalking the guy was never convincingly argued in this movie. Basically, the best explanation they could come up with was that, well, she became basically ‘crazy’ and did a lot of random weird stuff in the process but this explanation was rather lazy and obviously hardly satisfying. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I still don’t get why this movie has such a lame reputation and I think it is actually worth a look.