Product Description

Before Top Gun, Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff, this breathtaking, jet-fueled journey of high-altitude filmmaking blasted audiences from zero-G to 4,000 miles per hour with its thrilling tale of America's victory in the space race. Starring David McLean, Charles Bronson and Mary Tyler Moore, X-15 sets the sky as the limitfor excitement! The courageous pilots of the Air Force's X-15 program are determined to take an experimental rocket 100 miles above the earth at four times the speed of sound! At stake is American air supremacy and proof that space travelis possible. But also at stake are their lives and the lives of the terrified wives they've left behind!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19601 in DVD
• Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
• Released on: 2004-02-03
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 107 minutes

Amazon.com
Frank Sinatra was among the producers for X-15, an interesting space-race film that marked the feature debut of Richard Donner (the Lethal Weapon series, Timeline) and provided an early lead role for Charles Bronson, who leads a solid cast in this occasionally tense, hardware-driven drama. Bronson, David McLean, and Ralph Taeger are test pilots for the X-15 research vehicle, which brought man to the brink of outer space for the first time. The film divides its running time between scenes of the crew testing the rocket and domestic drama involving their wives and girlfriends (played by Mary Tyler Moore, Patricia Owens, and Lizabeth Hush). James Stewart's narration offers an all-American layer to the script, written by James Ward Bellah (whose stories were adapted by John Ford for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Sergeant Rutledge, among others) and producer Tony Lazzarino. Eagle-eyed fans might notice future California congressman Robert Dornan among the ground crew. MGM's widescreen DVD offers no extras. --Paul Gaita

Customer Reviews

Under-powered rocket picture...
Half plane, half rocket, the North American X-15 took test pilots to the edge of space for the first time, bridging the gap between air and space flight. This movie showcases the efforts of NASA and the X-15 group to get the experimental rocketplane in the air.

Fans of the X-15 will be in heaven, as they are treated to a ton of footage of the X-15 in testing, accidents, and actual flight. But sadly, for the rest of us, the movie is a gigantic bore. The X-15 itself is the star of the movie, the humans being incidental, more or less cardboard cut-outs.

The narration of Jimmy Stewart to limited to the opening and closing of the picture, while Mary Tyler Moore and the other officers' wives inexplicably vanish from the last quarter of the picture. Charles Bronson and the other leads are really pretty good, but despite their best efforts, it's really hard to care about them or the success of their plane.

The film is strangely lacking in real emotional content. What emotion there is is contrived and has a forced, "by-the-numbers" quality. Without any real human drama, it almost feels as if the movie had been put together by a computer.

As for the actual X-15 footage, it's hard even to get into that because almost all of the flight scenes are "stretched" to fit the widescreen format. As a result, all of the jets are twice as long and half as tall as they ought to look. Frankly, it's distracting, and so maybe the director should have opted for a smaller aspect ratio during filming so that the other footage would better match the X-15 footage.

Basically, a toy model of a rocket would soar higher than this picture does... and that's without lighting the engines!

MGM DVD doesn't help this turkey either...
Dick Donner's directorial debut is about as far from auspicious as you want to get and is no way evocative of the successes he would enjoy in later years with the likes of Superman and the Lethal Weapon series. This maudlin, mysoginist, cliche-ridden old-school melodrama is further marred by aspect ratio problems that have been explained sufficiently by other reviewers, so I won't get into that here--but what adds insult to injury is MGM DVD's hack mastering job. The studio didn't even bother to optimize the film for 16.9 televisions, which partially would have allowed viewers with 1.33 TVs to compensate for the aspect ratio problem by making an adjustment in their DVD player's display settings. Furthermore, with today's digital technology it would have been easy enough to correct the aspect ratio problem in a post house by either adjusting the stock footage to 2.35:1 by zooming in on it, or remastering the whole film at 16.9 by slicing off the edges of the footage that Donner shot. I would have preferred the latter approach as it would have sacrificed very little in terms of picture fidelity, and if this were a worthwhile film, I'd rip the DVD to my hard drive and do the scaling myself in Adobe AfterEffects. But, alas, I have a life and will leave this pursuit to only the most die-hard purists out there. Bottom line, MGM need to get a clue in regards to consistently formatting their legacy releases to 16.9, a practice they have yet to adapt. All they need to do is walk into any Good Guys store and notice that the vast majority of large TVs now take advantage of the wider aspect ratio.

About the aspect ratio problem
The aspect ratio issue addressed by other reviewers is genuine: stock NASA and USAF footage was massively used in this picture, but as this was shot in the standard aspect ratio of 1,37:1, it had to be stretched horizontally to match the 2,35:1 Panavision framing used for the rest of the movie. Hence the annoying distorsion that makes all aircraft look like some giant inadvertenly stamped his foot on them. Unfortunately, this is a flaw inherent to the movie itself, and the DVD is not to blame. The basic mistake was to shoot in widescreen a movie that relied so heavily on 'external' footage.