Sundance 2023: Radical, The Longest Goodbye | Festivals & Awards

“Radical” saves its most challenging material for the philosophies within, like looking at education as a process that needs resuscitation and inspiration, not the discipline and strict schedule that was put into place before Sergio arrived. And in the scheme of all the movies that “Radical” makes you think of, Zalla cleverly angles it as Sergio vs. the expectations of standardized tests and all the stuffy ideals they come with. 

There’s no inherent problem with aiming to be a crowd-pleaser, but that focus becomes more frustrating with “Radical” than it should. Zalla’s film occupies that strange place in which something inspired by a true story—and this one has an amazing, factual epilogue—is softened and broadened so much that even the heartwarming real stuff feels too good to be true. 

Within the next ten years, NASA plans to put people on a ship that will hopefully reach Mars. The big predicament, tackled by “The Longest Goodbye,” doesn’t concern whether the technology can work but the human factor. Such a journey will be an immense feat of “prolonged isolation,” with crew members spending months with each other in tight quarters and years away from their families. It is not how human beings have been wired, and many different minds are on the cutting edge of figuring out a solution. 

Ido Mizrahy’s “The Longest Goodbye,” a curious but overly dry documentary that premiered yesterday in the festival’s World Cinema Documentary section, spins in circles when collecting different options provided by scientists. Ideas like communicating with loved ones in virtual reality, talking to a floating robot head named CIMON, and hibernation are profiled here like windows into the future, initially furnished by dreams from science fiction. These possibilities are juggled with some curiosity, but their manner of being shared here, a la rotating presentations at a conference, gives it little narrative momentum, which is jarring compared to the high stakes of space exploration. 

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