Rocket Science
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10
This was supposed to be “outcast boy makes good in intellectual competition”. It was “loser boy, from loser parents who shouldn’t have bred, screws up his life more with help from an evil bitch-girl, intellect be damned”.
The acting is terrible. The situation is badly written, so the “trick” of switching who the good guy is seems like an obvious technique that was telegraphed from the beginning. The supporting roles are horrible horrible characters, so bad that they must be caricatures or someone should have called Child Welfare.
There is an element of what debate is supposed to be about, but when the story starts with the end of the previous year’s debate, we see a student fail. Then we hear he dropped out of high school and now works at a dry cleaners because of it. That’s almost a mockery of “people taking things seriously”. So it manages to look like debate is an activity for snooty people and everyone else should just stay home. Maybe it really is like that and it’s not about ability. Certainly joining a high school sports team requires more than athletic ability.
I didn’t like how intellect was not honored in this story. It really might have been a movie about loser boy getting conned into joining the track team instead since it was a movie about how outcasts are kept out.
We’re told to feel sorry for the main character, because he stutters and it keeps him from doing anything fun in life. We see him struggling to make progress when the school’s idea of “help” is a guy who studied pallative treatments for ADD and has no idea what to do in terms of speech therapy. But I can find 10 ideas on how to deal with stuttering, just online. Most of them are free— free advice and the advice doesn’t cost anything to implement. So it’s a case where he doesn’t even try to do anything to help himself.
There was a lot to really loathe in this movie and the resolution was not particularly pleasant.
It’s not uplifting, it’s not well told, it’s not about real people trying their best, it’s a movie showing that horrible people keep doing horrible things and they seem to like it that way.
