Critic Reviews

The archival footage here is great, and the cosmos-conquering craziness will satisfy space-race nuts.

It was really no bigger than a beach ball, weighed about as much as a full-grown man and it beeped. And aside from transmitting a radio signal and accidentally opening a few automatic garage doors, it didn't really do anything except orbit the globe once every 96 minutes.

A seemingly esoteric subject -- the launch of Russia's Sputnik satellite -- is exhumed and made exciting in this important slice of you-are-there documaking.

The movie lets parallels between that time and the post-9/11 era emerge organically, in the manner of a fable that subtly illuminates your own life.

Sputnik Mania has a happy ending, thanks to German scientist Werner von Braun, who had been recruited for America after designing Nazi rockets that rained terror on England during World War II.