SpaceCamp
First screened in 1986 or 1987 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Harry Winer. Cast: Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson, Tate Donovan, Joaquin Phoenix, Kelly Preston, Larry B. Scott, Tom Skerritt, Barry Primus, Mitchell Anderson, Scott Coffey. Screenplay: Clifford Green and Casey T. Mitchell (based on a screen story by Patrick Bailey and Larry B. Williams). In Brief:
Has trouble settling on an identity, even aside from evident production ills. But what's here will entertain your kids.
VOR:②
The uneasy straddling among young adult adventure, tense thriller, and NASA ad that undermines its coherence is also its point of interest.
I'd remembered this junior varsity voyage to the stars, long out of print and streaming nowhere, as actively bad—probably because even a 10-year-old could see that Kate Capshaw, surprise, was less than captivating as the adult in the crew and that Lea Thompson, surprise, made for rather a drab NASA prodigy. There are other problems, like the script somehow taking more than half the runtime to get these teen astronauts and their Feisty Mentor™ into orbit, and giving Capshaw and Thompson rather little to do once they're up there, and inhabiting a really uncertain troposphere between soft-pedaled, talking-robot kiddie escapade and higher-tension suspenser.
All of that's true, and I'm not surprised that debut director Harry Winer saw his career in features dry up almost as soon as it started. Beyond the gruesome coincidence of this movie's scheduled release and the Challenger disaster (for which Winer deserves nothing but sympathy) and the infamous shooting overruns that possibly explain the sense of cut corners and of the cast seeming so tired (which may not be his fault, either), the movie might have been hampered anyway by its odd rhythms, uncertain tone, and failure to really capitalize on either the grandeur or horror of being unintentionally blasted off into the blue/black yonder (for which Winer is surely liable, at least in part).
Say this, though: if you give up any hope on this being Mission to Mars and accept its initial remit to be a kid's own adventure in zero gravity, SpaceCamp basically suffices. As obviously indebted to NASA as Top Gun is to the Navy, and equally blatant as a recruiting poster, SpaceCamp's lack of anything like the same slickness or bastardy brio is more than a tad refreshing. And even if the script hustles both the outer-space disasters and their solutions along too quickly, I don't mind watching some gifted high-schoolers and one young kid—played with genuine, premonitory charisma and poignancy by tiny Joaquin Phoenix—get out of an intimidating jam through clever thinking and teamwork. If SpaceCamp's target was teenagers, pre-teens, and elementary-school tykes who aspire to the sophistication and moxie of these bland little sprigs, then it's adequately entertaining and maybe even moderately inspiring. C
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
