Clint Eastwood has been directing and occasionally starring in fall movies for the better part of the past quarter-century. Almost everything he’s made since 2003’s Mystic River has been released in that awards-movie corridor between September and late December, and even when the movies themselves didn’t turn out to be Oscar projects, they tended to have an elegiac, autumnal tone befitting a filmmaker so attuned to the nuances of aging, regrets, and American tragedy. But in his (relative) youth, Clint Eastwood used to make summer movies — popular entertainments in the pre-superhero era. In keeping with his later-period tendency toward movies that work as farewells to genres, historical eras, and himself, his August 2000 film Space Cowboys feels, with 25 years of hindsight, like his farewell to the traditional mass-appeal summer movie.
Yes, technically Blood Work from 2002 was Eastwood’s last starring vehicle to receive a summer release in the tradition of Escape from Alcatraz, In the Line of Fire, Firefox, Tightrope, and Pale Rider, among others. But Blood Work, fun as it is, is a pretty standard potboiler with some light Eastwoodian reckoning over mortality. Space Cowboys, meanwhile, expertly adopts a then-recent summer movie standby: the space adventure/disaster. Eastwood plays Frank Corvin, a pilot for the U.S. Air Force who, along with his old teammates Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones), Jerry (Donald Sutherland), and Tank (James Garner), was once a contender for space-flight missions before NASA came along and squeezed them out. (They’re humiliated by a press conference trotting out a chimp that will get the test-flight glory.) Decades later, Frank is called upon to assist a younger team with the repair of a damaged Soviet satellite. He parlays NASA’s desperation into a full space flight for his old team, which turns into a much bigger mission that must prevent an accidental missile launch. Basically, it’s Deep Impact or Armageddon for patrons of the early-bird special.
It’s typical of Eastwood’s interests as a filmmaker and a star that, rather than a rag-tag band of oil-rig roughnecks or a best-and-bravest on a last-minute mission, his version of this movie involves a quartet of comfortable old pros whose main obstacles are their bickering and their unconventional ages, both of which can be handily overcome by sheer professionalism. Early on, Frank uses his expertise to demand a shot at space travel from his former supervisor Bob (James Cromwell). When Bob hesitates to strike a deal, Frank issues a classic later-period Eastwoodism with a grin beneath that satisfying rasp: “Clock’s ticking, Bob. And I’m only getting older.”
As it turned out, Eastwood would get much older, later becoming the rare actor to star in a movie in his 90s. Compared to Cry Macho, Eastwood is in spring-chicken mode here (well, maybe summer chicken). While it’s been impressive to see one of the world’s great movie stars dedicate himself to the craft of directing — and attempting to make sense of recent American history while doing so — the Eastwood of Space Cowboys understands the crowd-pleasing appeal of letting older stars take another shot at glory. It’s almost like Eastwood caught his own performance In the Line of Fire (which he did not direct, and where he also plays a government employee named Frank with a defining early-’60s crossroad) on cable and thought, let me try to do that myself.
And he does, dammit, outshining both Deep Impact and Armageddon in the process. As a director of movie stars performing misfit antics, Eastwood has a lighter touch than Michael Bay. Granted, that’s not an unusual distinction, but an old hand like Clint helps the more comic training scenes with Jones, Garner, and Sutherland attempting to get up to NASA speed feel genial and inviting, rather than sweaty and condescending in the style of the many senior-quartet comedies that followed (Last Vegas; Book Club). Tommy Lee Jones has done plenty of mainstream movies to supplement his more serious projects over the years, sometimes obviously clocking in for a paycheck. Here, his flintiness feels genuinely soulful as the crew member most inspired to take stock of his life. He’s nearly as distinctive a presence as Eastwood himself.
Once the team actually gets into orbit, the classical vibe of Eastwood’s directing style becomes a surprisingly good match for an effects-heavy sci-fi-adjacent story. Rather than cutting through his images in an insecure frenzy to gin up apocalyptic tension, Eastwood gives the space scenery room to breathe (and honestly, the Industrial Light and Magic visual effects still look solid a quarter-century later). He and longtime cinematographer Jack N. Green shoot outer space not unlike how they might approach Western landscapes: with an appreciation for the natural beauty and mystery the characters are risking their lives to experience. It’s a space-mission movie that maintains a poignant sense of wonder that flashier pictures sometimes rush right by.
Space Cowboys doesn’t ultimately do for a final space mission what Eastwood’s fellow August release Unforgiven did for a final gunslinging assignment eight years earlier (which is to say, revisit a familiar genre in order to interrogate our assumptions about it). It’s not even quite as pulpily satisfying as In the Line of Fire, which exploited its connection to 1960s history more shamelessly and therefore more entertainingly. But it’s right in line with other summer entertainments Eastwood directed over the years, and downright soothing for anyone hoping to watch an astronaut thriller that isn’t beset with bombast, monsters, or space madness. Like Eastwood’s recent legal thriller Juror No. 2, it’s a movie so well-made that its implausibilities never stick. Space Cowboys only looks better with age — and unfortunate scarcity.
