Another surprise was how much emotion the humans invested in them. Anthropomorphizing—the process of investing non-human things with human traits—is the real subject of this movie, and the focus of most of its drama. Spirit and Opportunity are treated like people by the NASA team (and the filmmakers), in the manner of lovable cartoon characters or "Star Wars" androids. The routines and rituals associated with Spirit and Opportunity (Oppy for short) contribute to the sense that these long-necked metal things roving the ochre surface of Mars have personalities and feelings.
The bulk of the running time consists of news, documentary, and home movie footage taken during the mission, plus interviews with key members of the team, but White and company got a mighty assist from expensive state-of-the-art computer effects, which re-create the Mars mission in a style that recalls "Wall-E," "The Martian," and other science-fiction epics. Whenever there's a cut to a closeup of the camera unit atop a rover's neck, we can't help thinking of it as a face. When one of them struggles to get out of a sandy sinkhole or change course despite a busted wheel, we root for them, just as we might for Mustafa, Black Beauty, Lassie, R2-D2, or any other non-human character who becomes an honorary person by virtue of having the audience's emotions poured into them.
The interviewees describe what they were thinking and feeling as they tried to figure out how to get the robots from one place to another, maneuver them out of sand traps, and figure out workarounds for equipment failures and geographical impediments. They consider the years they spent tending to Spirit and Oppy to be the highlight of their lives. Some of the people involved in the mission were in their teens or twenties back in the aughts and now have children, and/or have endured decline and loss. Witnesses who compare the robots' technical problems to arthritis or Alzheimers' have good reason for using those analogies: they've experienced them.
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