It’s Quieter in the Twilight is a space exploration documentary that would make a nice companion piece to Good Night Oppy. The earlier doc was about the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity that keep on truckin’… this new doc is about the older Voyager 1 & 2 spacecrafts that have left the solar system… and keep on truckin’.
The documentary is primarily focused on how this nearly fifty year mission is being run today by a skeleton crew of aging scientists and engineers. How they monitor the data from the spacecrafts and issue occasional commands that take 20 hours to reach the craft and 20 hours for a reply. I suspect there’s a lot of downtime in this job.
This is, unfortunately, a pretty uneven documentary. It contains a sparse – but interesting – history of the spacecrafts (without even a single mention of V’Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture… scandalous!). There is a brief segment on how the mission came together (due to a convergence of the gas giants) but it’s pretty lite on details. They don’t even really mention the gold disc containing greetings from Earth… which is how I learned about the crafts as a kid.
The doc’s primary focus is on the aging caretakers and how they communicate with the probes as they slowly age (both the people and the spacecrafts). We get some bios of a handful of the twelve person team… which, good for them, but I’d have preferred more focus on the history of the machines. Plus the interviews get a little repetitive after awhile… the team is sad and wistful knowing the crafts will eventually go silent. That’s important and bittersweet… but the doc repeats itself way too often.
They avoid personifying the spacecrafts (unlike the doc about Spirit and Opportunity) but they also inject some weak suspense. A sequence set to dramatic music plays where they are worried they aren’t getting a signal back… and then they clam up and ask the film crew to leave like there’s some kind of conspiracy. I’m sure they did stop talking but the doc made it weird…. before hand-waving it away when they had the data and were willing to talk again.
This is a missed opportunity (pun intended). It’s got some solid information, just not enough of it. I wanted more history and science and the doc was more interested in the personalities in the present at the expense of the past. Nothing wrong with knowing the state of things and getting to know the team… but maybe a little of that goes a long way?
Score: 75