Os Eleitos

No outro dia estive a rever este espantoso filme. Por mais vezes que o veja, nunca me farto. Recomendo vivamente que vejam este filme. E recomendo que leiam o livro também, claro.

O filme retrata os pioneiros da era espacial. Retrata os casos de sucesso – aqueles que não morreram a tentar.
Vê-se por exemplo a personalidade ambiciosa de Chuck Yeager que quebrou a barreira de som, mesmo com costelas partidas.
Vê-se também as vidas dos 7 magníficos, e de como eles chegaram a heróis da humanidade: os 7 astronautas das missões Mercury: John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Walter Schirra, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom e Donald “Deke” Slayton.

O filme mostra os heróis famosos mas também alguns anónimos dos quais não ouvimos falar antes.
O filme é um Hino a todos aqueles que fizeram progredir a Humanidade.

É curioso que os heróis são simultaneamente competentes e arrogantes.
São pessoas que arriscam bastante, e seguem aquilo que querem.
Apesar da natureza solitária que evidenciam, a verdade é que demonstram bastante solidariedade entre si.

Algumas das citações mais famosas do filme:

Narrator: There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

Chuck Yeager: Monkeys? You think a monkey knows he’s sittin’ on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys they know that, see? Well, I’ll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on TV. Ol’ Gus, he did all right.

Alan Shepard: Dear Lord, please don’t let me fuck up.
Gordon Cooper: I didn’t quite copy that. Say again, please.
Alan Shepard: I said everything’s A-OK.

Lyndon Johnson: And as I was sayin’, whoever controls the high ground of space controls the world. The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads. Later, the British Empire was dominant because they had ships. In the Air Stage, we were powerful because we had the airplane. And now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space. Pretty soon they’ll have damned space platforms so they can drop nuclear bombs on us, like rocks from a highway overpass. Now HOW IN THE HELL did they ever get ahead of us?