Space Cowboys (2000)
Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys comes with one very familiar scenario - The men on a mission movie. However this is slightly different and unique (for it's time of release) in that the men going on said mission are all old timers and the mission in question is in space.
It's great seeing Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner and Donald Sutherland sparring off one another as ageing former astronauts brought back into the NASA fold to retrieve a satellite before it crashes into the Earth. Naturally there's a twist and things don't go quite to plan.
Certainly Space Cowboys is a bit cliche but it uses cliche's that work rather than making the viewer cringe and melancholy, whilst in the story, is handled nicely by Eastwood the director, thus not making the movie either too jingoistic nor overly sentimental.
The film has some excellent special effects work, making you believe it was genuinely shot in space orbiting the Earth, but when you get actors of this class together along with great supports from the likes of Marcia Gay Harden, James Cromwell and William Devane there's as much to appreciate from the acting as there is from the story itself and that's what made it really entertaining from my point of view.
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