Two Danish guys shoot for the stars, by attempting to home-build a craft capable of space travel, on a partially crowdfunded budget six orders of magnitude smaller than NASA’s, in Max Kestner‘s engaging doc, “Amateurs In Space,” which plays as part of the Transilvania Film Festival‘s documentary sidebar. It’s a film that feels immediately ripe for a narrative feature remake, if only Hollywood can work out which formula to follow: should it be a gentle comedy starring Ben Mendelsohn, that follows the wacky adventures of an odd couple of Danes and their David-and-Goliath story? Or should it be a tragedy starring Ben Mendelsohn, about grand dreams brought low by peevishness, and about overcoming massive external obstacles only for your inner demons to pull you back down faster than gravity? (Either way, it needs to star Ben Mendelsohn, who not only resembles one of the two men physically, he’s also one of the only actors who could embody such a mercurial, unlikely, fatally flawed human as the Peter Madsen we get here). “Amateurs In Space,” while a fairly standard all-access/talking heads documentary in form, is a solid account of both of those fascinating stories, detailing an against-all-odds backyard operation that got closer to the heavens than anyone would have credited, before the partnership from which it derived its energy exploded on re-entry.
It’s appropriate that of the two, the bald, youthful but worried-looking family man Kristian von Bengtson was the civilian engineer tasked with designing and building the manned capsule, the “Tycho Brahe.” Peter Madsen, the volatile, Mendelsohnian inventor who was previously instrumental in Denmark’s first civilian submarine project took charge of creating the launchpad and the “Heat IX” booster rocket that was to propel the Tycho Brahe into the stratosphere. Their personality clashes were evident from the outset, with the quiet, sensible von Bengtson largely rolling with Madsen’s punches, absorbing his erratic mood swings and parrying his personal attacks until, just when it seemed like victory was within grasp, they become too vicious to bear.
It’s almost as if, when the project is experiencing setbacks, including a failed test launch, a constant lack of money, and the struggle to keep an expanding team of volunteers and fellow amateurs on the same page, Madsen’s nervy energy can be channeled in productive, problem-solving ways. But after the first unalloyed success for the team, when they get their rocket to finally fly in a perfectly straight trajectory directly up, Madsen’s paranoia, which is hinted at being a symptom of deeper mental issues, compounded by a recent concussion, flares up and can’t be quelled. Perhaps there is another version of this film in which Madsen doesn’t come off as quite such an ungracious, wheedling toddler, but “Amateurs In Space” makes no bones about whose side its on.
Formally, there’s not much to write home about, with rather too literal recreations of email exchanges contributing to an ironic sense of inertia in the images. But occasionally, the photography from Kim Høgh Mikkelsen, Claus Mejling and Poul Meyer will linger on some telling detail. A battered $12 hairdryer becomes a kind of badge of honor for the whole endeavor, symbolizing the make-do-and-mend spirit of invention that gives the film its zanier moments. A lot of the fun of the first half comes from the improbable pair batting around suggestions for making part of the capsule out of MDF, or adapting IKEA products, or complaining about the lack of double-sided tape in a local hardware superstore. The contrast between those banal moments and the immensity of their ambitions is cock-eyed and oddly charming, these two practical dreamers trying to gaffer-tape their way to the moon.
“Per aspera ad astra” (“through hardships to the stars”) is how Peter rather grandiloquently signs his increasingly bitter little emails. But on its way to the stars, their company, Copenhagen Suborbitals gets tangled up in the hardships, many of them self-imposed. And so “Amateurs In Space” tells a remarkably ambivalent story whose glass-half-empty/glass-half-full effect probably says as much about the viewer as the actual tale itself: it’s both deeply depressing that such petty personality bickering brought the project tumbling to Earth and very inspiring that it got off the ground at all. And in the end, the film does scratch at a deeper truth about the co-dependence of these oppositional personalities, and though Madsen comes out of it very badly, there is an underlying respect for the obsessiveness that fuelled both his drive and his self-destruction. Infuriatingly childish and irrational though so much of his behavior was, the project (which is still ongoing without the involvement of either of its founder members) needed him like the spaceship needed his booster rocket. He was never going to be able to land it, but it was a dream maybe only he ever could have launched. [B]
