​The TV show For All Mankind posits that if the Soviets had gotten to the moon first, the shame of it would’ve kept the US competing in the Space Race long after the end of the Apollo program.  Moon bases would’ve been established, rocketry would’ve continued to advance, NASA would’ve widened its reach to women and minorities, and we’d get to Mars.  The technological leaps would’ve kept coming because the pure discovery of the thing isn’t enough to keep the money spigot open.  National security interests, more than anything else, are what makes the dollars flow.  The Right Stuff meticulously documents the way that the first stages of the Cold War are driven by the military and the raw masculine desire to come out on top, watching admiringly at the results produced by the sheer resources of the government and the derring-do of the cast.  Phillip Kaufman’s three-hour-plus epic gets back to an exciting time in American life, one that feels like it was metaphorically elevating the citizenry as it was shooting the ‘best’ of us into the outer atmosphere.  The Right Stuff also pokes fun at a period of repeated failures and humiliations that is aggressively sold to the public as a mythic adventure.  Though it seems unlikely that anyone would call it the most imaginative or cinematic of any American film about space travel or the space program, Kaufman does produce a thorough depiction of the men of the Mercury program, their predecessors at Edwards Air Force Base, and what distinguished the two groups.

​Shakespeare’s tale of paranoia and guilt gets a stylized adaptation in Justin Kurzel’s MacBeth.  The Australian director, when he’s not doing the ultimate one-for-them with an Assassin’s Creed adaptation, is fascinated by contemporary monsters, as evidenced by his debut feature The Snowtown Murders about a serial killer and his latest, Nitram, about the Port Arthur mass shooting.  In between, Kurzel made True History of the Kelly Gang, a period piece that both lionizes and undermines a 19th century Australian outlaw.  Kurzel’s twin interests in violent extremity and curiosity about the people who commit those kinds of crimes make him well-suited for Macbeth, a play about an ostensibly good man who turns into a tyrant without much convincing.  Starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard at high points of their respective careers, Kurzel’s Macbeth has all the ingredients for a top-notch adaptation.

​In the book Twelve Who Ruled, an in-depth examination of the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution by Robert Roswell Palmer, a lot of pages are given over to Louis Antoine de Saint Just and justifiably so.  In his mid-20’s when he makes it onto the Committee of Public Safety that runs France during this period, Saint Just is depicted as an effective firebrand, not as bloodthirsty as some of his colleagues but plenty vigorous in keeping France from falling to the monarchist armies that surround it.  He gets the book’s most romantic passages, like he and his close friend Le Bas are mythic heroes riding into towns beset by counter-revolution, only for them to quickly set thing right and move on into the sunset.  Saint Just died in shame like a lot of other French did in this period, but a year or so before he went, he uttered his most famous line at the trial of Louis XVI; ‘One cannot reign innocently.’  In Judas and the Black Messiah, it’s unknown if the young revolutionary at its center could’ve one day achieved great power and influence only to fall into the traps of governance himself, as Saint Just did, because those that reigned during Fred Hampton’s time made sure that never happened.  What Hampton shares with his revolutionary antecedents is the certainty of youth and a single-minded focus on a better future, plus a cadre of enemies who have no vision but the furtherance of the status quo.