Mission Pluto

Release Date: July 12, 2015

Watch Date: May 15, 2023

    You ever get the impression that a documentary isn’t really sure what it’s meant to be about? Because I get that impression with this documentary, and let me explain why:

    It is, I think, meant to be about the New Horizons mission to take pictures of Pluto at extremely close range. It’s meant to be about the launch, the science behind the satellite, and what we expect to find on Pluto, with a bit of history of Pluto thrown in. But that’s not really what we get. I think they also wanted it to maybe be about what they were going to find on Pluto, but since, strangely, they didn’t wait to make the documentary about the discoveries we made about Pluto, we just get a lot of conjecture about what those discoveries might be, which is science – making hypotheses, but not really anything you want to retain, because now that we have the information on Pluto that New Horizons sent back…I’m not really sure any of their hypothesis ended up being accurate.

    Generally, we get a touch of the history of Pluto, which for our purposes was less than a century old. A little bit of it’s discovery, a little bit of it’s naming, a lot about how it was a planet, and still is technically but now it’s a dwarf planet because there’s seven thousand other Pluto shaped things out there. They talk about how we almost missed our window to launch a satellite to the dwarf planet, so lucky for us to have discovered it when we did. But mostly it’s just a bunch of scientists being really excited that they launched this thing, that it might work, and at what they might discover.

    The host really bugged me, and I don’t know why. I guess he hosts some game shows on National Geographic, he alluded to that anyways – as if I was supposed to know and be impressed that he was in this Pluto documentary, but I don’t know him, and I wasn’t. He was also wearing an extremely unflattering t-shirt and I know he didn’t just show up to set with it, so there was probably one wardrobe person and they could’ve picked something just a little bit better, and ideally a lot less busy.

    As far as a documentary goes, and as far as a documentary on Pluto goes, I’m sure there’s better ones. This one tries to do too much, and ends up not quite being about New Horizons, not quite being about Pluto’s history, and definitely not being about anything we can definitively say about Pluto because of the data from New Horizons, since there wasn’t any.

    And I don’t want to say Bob fell asleep while we watched it, but he did. Now he’d had a long day, but he picked the space movie, and he loves space, and it couldn’t even keep his attention for forty-five minutes. So, I don’t want to say it’s a bad documentary, because it’s not. It’s just unsure of itself and it’s place in the documentary spectrum, and the story it wanted to tell. Kind of like Pluto, if I had to personify it, I suppose. But can I say it was a good documentary?

    No.

    You could skip it.