It takes the piss but also doesn't, which is what happened in Tom Wolfe's masterful book. This does feel like two movies though - one about Chuck Yeager, a gum chewing laconic modern day cowboy with his fellow gum chewing laconic modern day cowboy friends (seriously they're always chewing) strutting around being cool and manly with big dick energy breaking speed records. This is short like a John Ford film (elegiac funeral scenes) with a dash of Howard Hawks in Barbara Hersey's feisty hard galloping wife and Kim Stanley's hard drinking bar owner.
The other film is more Frank Capra/Preston Sturges, with wacky NASA ops (Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum are genuinely funny), swarms of journalists, bombastic politicians (notably LBJ), lots (and lots) of jokes about urine.
I wonder if Kaufman bit off more than he could chew - another writer may have helped. William Goldman's original script was discarded - he wanted to just focus on the astronauts which I think was the correct idea, the two films here co-exist uneasily. I mean who gives a shit if the astronauts earn Yeager's respect?
Dennis Quaid is full of charismatic swagger and makes you wonder why he never became a big star - I'm sure he wonders that too - but then you realise he doesn't have the vulnerability of Tom cruise. If Quaid had played the lead in Top Gun it wouldn't have been as big a hit - Cruise looked as though he needed to be mothered but Quaid looked as though he could handle himself.
There's a few har-har-har military-style jokes about urination, Scott Glenn imitates a hispanic (apparently Alan Shepherd did a lot of this), they don't have Deke Slayton being turned down for some reason, Scott Carpenter is hardly in it. Weird final scene with the astronauts smiling at each other intercut with a fan dance.
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