Houston, We Have a Problem! (2016)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

ridiculous rating

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

While this documentary promised a deep look into a deal between Yugoslavia and the United States to transfer space technology to NASA, there is not enough new information presented to even fill a short magazine article. Most of the film is padded with stories about Yugoslavia's history, Tito and a single scientist from Yugoslavia who travels back to his home country for the first time in 50 years.What little information is presented comes from an American historian who seems to be the only one in the documentary who speaks English. Subtitles are needed for most of the interviews in this film.In any event, if you want to see a documentary that gives a passing mention to the Yugoslavian space program and more of a backstory into US-Yugoslavian relations from the 1960's to 1970's you may enjoy this. Beyond the first 30 minutes or so don't expect to learn much about NASA, the space program or what this title is supposed to focus on.

The movie could be interpreted in many different ways, that is the reason why it is so entertaining. You can see it as comedy and a stupid presentation of Yugoslavia like Borat did with Kazakhstan, you can see it as black satire made by Kusturica, you can see it as story that actually happened (somehow) in real world or you can see it as total fiction..... . The special aspect of movie is in Slavoj Žižek's involvement. For those who never have any experience with Yugoslavia it seems that he is the person who is trust able - at the end he said, that even it is not truth, it really happened. For those who lived in Yugoslavia, it could be some "way for explanation" why living in Yugoslavia was not so frustrating and was really better in comparison to other communists states. On the other hand, the consequences of "selling space program".... were so devastating for many in Yugoslavia. Anyhow,it is must to see this movie...

I enjoyed this movie, probably because being from the region and living through the demise of Yugoslavia I was left with so many unanswered questions. I am not sure if this movie answers them in the most truthful way, but it tries to give a plausible scenario. To counterpoint the previous review, this movie to me was foretelling the saying "if you play with the wolf you'll end up being eaten". There is no argument that Tito's charisma was not an equal match for American imperialism. If anything, he and his little country were the mouse that USA needed to play with in order to match up with the Soviet space program, if this story has any historical merit. Therefore, I felt that there were few essential questions still left out and that the movie was trying to play it safe and appeal to western audiences as a political thriller rather than a historical documentary. The main story of an engineer going back to Yugoslavia after living in the USA for 5 decades and meeting his daughter contained few inconsistencies and seemed over dramatized. The interesting commentator/narrator role of Zhizhek was also a bit over the top while offering simplistic analysis. I kept wondering "why isn't he wearing shoes" and "he needs a new pair of socks" throughout his energetic delivery. Nevertheless, I enjoyed all the documentary footage of Tito since for the first time I was looking at him as if he was an ordinary person. And I felt compassion towards him, even though this time I wasn't obliged to do so by the regime. Maybe after seeing other regimes fail in even more humiliating ways I realized the tough job he was trying to do. And this is the ultimate value of this docudrama.

This movie is really an amazing peace of work. I took everything it told me as truth and let it create certain feelings. At the end I went back to an assumption that it is fabricated but the feelings remained very solid and suddenly a lot of other information about the past started to fill in the gaps where fabrication was removed. Everything started to make more sense. It was not a pleasant discovery. It's one thing to feel as a victim of some powerful force, but to finally realize your own active role in the abuse, I think it is even harder to accept. Every movie, no matter what genre, is some type of manipulation and an attempt from author to present his own illusion. This movie seems like it is an illusion constructed to deliver the truth, indirectly.