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| Science Forum Index » Space - History Forum » Movie Semireview: I Aim At The Stars... |
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| Joseph Nebus... |
 Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 1:28 pm |
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Pat Flannery <flanner at (no spam) daktel.com> writes:
[quote:7f0b63be7b]Joseph Nebus wrote:
But the human-interaction side is drained, too. Some of that may
be a reflection that minor Prussian aristocrats are not generally regarded
as passionate people and a credible portrayal would reflect that. But Von
Braun's married life is walled off in a side plot; the romance given is
between one of Von Braun's underlings and the Secret Allied Spy, and the
biggest tension hook connecting protagonist Von Braun to this is him not
noticing her lipstick-camera in the ruins after the Peenemunde bombing.
The Peenemunde team were appalled by that movie when they saw it,
although they got a big kick out of von Braun's secretary being a sexy
spy (she came over with him when the team went to the US) as she was
around 60 years old and married. They ribbed her constantly about her
"spying" after seeing the movie, as she would get red in the face and
start sputtering out "I VAS NO SPY!" and they found that hilarious.
[/quote:7f0b63be7b]
I thought it felt historically dubious that the secretary would
happen to be the Allied Spy, just from not having heard such a juicy
tidbit in background reading. Would be a fine source of humor for the
team after the movie's release, though.
[quote:7f0b63be7b] Conspicuously omitted is more than a fleeting mention of the
Mittelwerk plant, and any mention of Camp Dora.
[/quote:7f0b63be7b]
[quote:7f0b63be7b]That whole mess was brushed under the rug in the US in the years after
the war because of the Peenemunde team's work on our missile and space
programs.
About the first time I read anything about it was in the English
translation of the German book about the WWII rocket program ("The Birth
Of The Missile" by Ernst Klee and Otto Merk*) from 1965, and the full
scope of the slave labor program didn't really get known to the US
public until after WvB died.
[/quote:7f0b63be7b]
Oh, now, that's something I hadn't considered; shows what I get
for being born so late, I suppose. Well, I can't fault the movie for not
including details which were generally obscured when it was produced [1].
It does still leave the core weakness of the movie, though, that there's
not enough detail for the story to appeal to the joy-of-tinkering kind of
story, and not enough focus on the horrifying sides of the rocket program
to make the deal-with-the-devil story really pay off. The character von
Braun argues at one point that his position isn't morally that different
from any normal munitions maker in times of war, and from the movie's
content that's about all there is to say about it, which undercuts the
efforts to show a strong resistance to him for the evils done during the
war.
[1] Although this does mean the intelligence officer character
would know more about von Braun than the people making the film did, at
least in the movie's continuity. This is a curious paradox which comes
about from taking movies too seriously.
--
Joseph Nebus
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| Rusty Shackelford... |
| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 5:02 pm |
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Interesting. Apparently they truncated the subtitle of Dr. von Braun's
biography. The real title was:
I Aim at the Stars
(but I often hit London)
Really, ask any Brit old enough to remember WWII. |
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| Greg D. Moore (Strider)... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 7:45 am |
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"Rusty Shackelford" <rusty at (no spam) arlen.com> wrote in message
news:6cuzm.77465$5n1.48786 at (no spam) attbi_s21...
[quote:809b873b84]Interesting. Apparently they truncated the subtitle of Dr. von Braun's
biography. The real title was:
I Aim at the Stars
(but I often hit London)
Really, ask any Brit old enough to remember WWII.
[/quote:809b873b84]
Or ask any fan of Tom Lehrer. :-)
--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC. |
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| Rusty Shackelford... |
| Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 11:38 pm |
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Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:
[quote:64796d105b]"Rusty Shackelford" <rusty at (no spam) arlen.com> wrote in message
news:6cuzm.77465$5n1.48786 at (no spam) attbi_s21...
Interesting. Apparently they truncated the subtitle of Dr. von Braun's
biography. The real title was:
I Aim at the Stars
(but I often hit London)
Really, ask any Brit old enough to remember WWII.
Or ask any fan of Tom Lehrer. :-)
[/quote:64796d105b]
Thanks for the reminder, I'd forgotten that old Tom Lehrer song. Very
much in the same spirit.
I used to work with a Brit who was one of a handful of British engineers
who worked on the Apollo program under von Braun. That sarcastic
response to von Braun's "I Aim for the Stars" was a pretty common joke
amongst the small British engineering community that worked under von
Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) back in the
1960's/early 1970's. Most of them respected von Braun's technological
foresight and public relation's savvy, but had lingering doubts about
the man's ethical standards. A complex man to say the least. |
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