Eastwood: Space Cowboys (2000)

If Unforgiven was Eastwood’s elegy for his Western heyday, then Space Cowboys is his elegy for his Cold War heyday – specifically, the vertical horizons of The Eiger Sanction and Firefox. It revolves around an air force unit – Team Daedelus – that found itself discharged when space exploration was handed over from the air force to NASA. Fast forward to the present day, when NASA is faced with a Russian satellite whose orbit is rapidly decaying, and whose technology is so antiquated that it can only be repaired by Team Daedelus. All four members of the team have been forced to deflect their galactic, heavenly ambitions into earthbound pursuits – engineer Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland) test drives roller coasters, pilot “Hawk” Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) runs barely-legal thrill flights, navigator “Tank” Sullivan (James Garner) has become a priest, and commanding officer Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood) spends most of his time fixing up pieces of “obsolete technology.” Corvin’s profession might seem less expansive than those of his former colleagues, but what makes the film such a quintessential Eastwood joint is the way it fuses good old-fashioned craftsmanship with the American technological sublime. Made for an age in which space exploration no longer has the same spectacular currency that it once did, Eastwood eschews the nostalgia of, say, The Right Stuff, to insist that the technological craftsmanship that serviced space is still alive and kicking, if only in own his own mastery of B-pictures. Among other things, that makes for Eastwood’s wryest film about aging since Heartbreak Ridge – the agile ageing of Absolute Power has been given a gravity-free kick here, meaning that, at least in outer space, Eastwood moves as dextrously as he ever did. And while there’s no doubt that the outer space sequences have a stereoscopic expansiveness that’s all Eastwood’s own, it’s the earthbound sequences that actually feel the most sublime, if only because they're also the cosiest. All four men are still affectively poised at the moment between air force exploration and space exploration, still dreaming of the most distant reaches of the exosphere, and that makes for a stronger sense of the Earth’s curvature than in any of Eastwood’s other films – all his horizons meet in the middle, kiss the sky, while every lateral movement has a kind of buoyancy that seems destined to carry it above the clouds (at one point, Eastwood steers a car in a jet plane’s slipstream). It all makes for a Western that’s been turned on its side, rotated ninety degrees – and while visions of the space race often emphasise its remoteness, the way it stupifies action into a sublime stare, Eastwood’s galaxy starts right at the horizon, just as the Cold War of The Eiger Sanction started at Monument Valley.