Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott’s Road to the Stars | Review

Mike Woolf follows Richard Garriot along this journey from obsessive tycoon to humbled astronaut like he’s helping make a video journal, but as the documentary progresses, Garriot’s goofy presence gives way to human discovery and international camaraderie. On a sliding scale of wealth and indulgence, Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott’s Road to the Stars slowly reveals a son seeking his father’s respect, and a man desperately searching for the ultimate experience. His extraordinary journey garnered the Audience Award at SXSW back in 2010, but despite this, the film’s relevance is questionable in the face of other space bound docs.

Working out of his bedroom as a teen, Garriot crafted one of the first video role playing games on an Apple II computer. His homemade creation was the start to an enormously lucrative career in video game development, eventually leading him to the purchase of a commercial space flight so that he could follow in his astronaut father’s spacewalking footsteps. Almost solely based around interviews with Richard, the doc starts with an abbreviated history of his career as a video game designer. His fantasy based Ultima series became some of the best selling video games of the 80s and 90s, and thus Garriot became mind blowingly wealthy in his early 20s. Alongside the remainder of the film, this section feels out of place, but the need to explain why he can afford a $30 million ticket into orbit is relevant, if not necessary.

Garriot is a man who’s thirst for experiential entertainment is satisfied only by lavish and extreme adventure. This search for adventure was ingrained in him as a young boy by his father who was a NASA astronaut flying missions back in 1973. After being shut down by NASA, Richard’s aspirations to become one of the first private astronauts were fulfilled by the Russian Federal Space Agency, who agreed to enroll him in a one year, full time training program in which he was to learn Russian, endure a barrage of physical stress trainings, and undergo a wide variety of emergency preparation prior to launch. Along the way we learn bits of Russian Space program history, and witness many of the formalities that take place within the program leading up to take off. Following each step of Garriot’s training, Woolf captures the process, the progress and payoff over the year long journey.

We behold all of the unpleasant physical trainings and the grand achievement of a successful space voyage, and subliminally we are told that if you dream big, anything can happen. Unfortunately, most of us will never be millionaires with the privilege to spend without repercussions, and watching Garriot do so with such egregious waste is often downright annoying. That said, seeing the highly involved steps that each astronaut must take to ensure safety is an intriguing experience. Sadly, Man on a Mission‘s balance between the tycoon and his journey is never quite reached, leaving behind a bitter mixture of resent, curiosity, and awe that finally gives way to an unmemorable, watery finish.

Rating 2 stars