This is a very poor film about one of the greatest disasters of the 20th Century. It just drags on and on to ramble on the months before the mission, focusing on Christa McCauliffe (played by Karen Allen) - teacher and first civilian to be selected for a NASA program, and focusing on the NASA crew trying to maintain everything under the schedule instead of securing a safe flight for Challenger's seven crew members. Sorry to spoil it, but the movie concludes without CNN's classical footage of the explosion (probably left out of this film because it would be somewhat distasteful to an incident still fresh in people's minds), and without any disclaimers telling about the investigation made about the accident and the impact such tragedy caused all over the world. A 2013 TV movie was made about the investigation with Feynman as the main character. Hope it'll be better than this.
What I've seen is a movie that doesn't handle well with its technical information, and whenever we're in the board control we're either bored or annoyed with the amount of times the "O-Ring" component is mentioned by someone. A problem in this piece along with another factors were the main cause for the ship's collapse. Without a prologue informing us what really happened we can assume it was that that really happened. But "Challenger" has its good moments, provided by Joe Morton, Angela Bassett, Lane Smith, Richard Jenkins and the great Peter Boyle as the NASA member who tries to do his job in the best possible way, warning everybody about the spaceship's problems but to no avail cause he's pressured to look the other way. The other actors didn't involve me all that much, poor acting, no connection with each other, quite amateurish. And we can blame the script which provided a poor selection of moments often focused on the negative aspects of launching or uninteresting scenes involving the crew families.
It gets more stars than it deserves due to the production effort in using the Cape Canaveral facilities, access was given to the movie's production and in that aspect it looks authentic and interesting. 5/10
P.S. (28 January 2016 - 30 years later): the 2013 movie mentioned was "The Challenger", starring William Hurt and it's a masterpiece.
What I've seen is a movie that doesn't handle well with its technical information, and whenever we're in the board control we're either bored or annoyed with the amount of times the "O-Ring" component is mentioned by someone. A problem in this piece along with another factors were the main cause for the ship's collapse. Without a prologue informing us what really happened we can assume it was that that really happened. But "Challenger" has its good moments, provided by Joe Morton, Angela Bassett, Lane Smith, Richard Jenkins and the great Peter Boyle as the NASA member who tries to do his job in the best possible way, warning everybody about the spaceship's problems but to no avail cause he's pressured to look the other way. The other actors didn't involve me all that much, poor acting, no connection with each other, quite amateurish. And we can blame the script which provided a poor selection of moments often focused on the negative aspects of launching or uninteresting scenes involving the crew families.
It gets more stars than it deserves due to the production effort in using the Cape Canaveral facilities, access was given to the movie's production and in that aspect it looks authentic and interesting. 5/10
P.S. (28 January 2016 - 30 years later): the 2013 movie mentioned was "The Challenger", starring William Hurt and it's a masterpiece.