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‘Starman’ Review: An Outer Space Documentary That’s Out of This World
Full of extraordinary footage, Robert Stone's blissed-out mind-bender of a movie meditates on the possibilities of life in the universe.
The film’s director, Robert Stone, made what I consider to be the single greatest documentary about the American space program — the six-hour-long “Chasing the Moon,” which was shown on PBS in 2019. He’s the starman of the title, a true believer back then who remains one today, and he’s a giddy and voluble and stoked personality, a man possessed by the promise of other worlds, a feeling he makes contagious. The film puts forth a fascinating thesis, illustrated with hundreds of light bulbs arranged on a concrete surface, which is that in a universe that likely contains a trillion planets, the prospect that some of them evolved the way Earth did is overwhelmingly large, but that it may be in the nature of advanced civilizations to die out.
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