Mission to Mir: IMAX (1997)

Mission to MIR is a fine documentary -- that's documentary as in education, not entertainment, so if your brain hits the snooze button when it comes to rocket science, go watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. This IMAX movie relates what it's like for the American astronauts who train with the Russian cosmonauts at Star City, 32 km NE of cold snowy Moscow, and launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world's largest rocket complex in Kazakhstan, for their months-long assignments in the MIR module of the International Space Station. Being an astronaut floating weightless above the Earth is way cool no matter from which of the six degrees of freedom you look at it, despite the challenges of material and societal isolation and physical atrophy that must be faced. Shannon Lucid is the primary lens through whom more than half of this documentary is presented, and her infectious laughter and enthusiasm makes a visible difference in the morale of her fellow astronauts. These astronauts are not only the best of our best but they study Russian for three years before training and working and living in space for months while speaking only Russian -- so take a nap on your own time and learn about something cosmically cool with this DVD. Spaceflight is much too enlightening to make me ever snooze. It's true that an IMAX film loses some of its impact in the translation from a 52-by-72-foot screen (average size) to a computer or TV screen that's 2-4 percent of that size but the soundtrack (voice and music) was in perfect shape on my copy of the disc. I give it less than 4 stars only because it's less exciting than other IMAX space documentaries I've enjoyed. 3.5 stars.