IRON MAN IIIN SPAAACE!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Solo astronauts are our heroes! Sure, the full crews of Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff are fine, but ever since Stanley Kubrick’s visionary 2001: A Space Odyssey saw Keir “Dave” Dullea pull the plug on Richard Daystrom’s malfunctioning Ultimate Computer — a full year before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon pretty easily because no evil A.I. showed up to stop him — filmmakers have enjoyed pondering the scenario, “What if you had an entire massive spaceship all to yourself and you alone had to save the day or get killed?” In my case it would be a short film: the Dramamine I’d need to overcome my motion-sickness issues would probably get used up before reaching the first million-mile marker and I’d end up dead by dehydration due to nonstop vomiting.
The astro-lone-wolf tradition has come up in such recent sci-fi dramas as Moon, Gravity, Ad Astra, and The Martian. Andy Weir, whose novel was the foundation of the latter, apparently loved the concept so much that he reexamined it from a new angle in his most recent book Project Hail Mary: instead of stranding an astronaut on Mars and forcing him to survive till the scientists back home could rescue him…what if the stranded astronaut had to save the scientists back home? And everyone else back home? Also, what if he wasn’t even an astronaut?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 