A Space Program isn’t quite a science fiction film. It’s also not quite a documentary film. It’s a film about a contemporary artist, Tom Sachs, and his small army of studio assistants, as they build, launch and successfully complete an Earthly approximation of a manned mission to Mars.
A Space Program is the stylish movie version of Sachs’ 2012 project Space Program: Mars, a four-week installation in the Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. During the course of the show, Sachs and his studio team conducted demonstrations of their entirely handmade space exploration complex for live audience, complete with sets for a mission control, a Mars lander, surface sampling equipment and a stress-relieving tea ceremony.
Using the concept of bricolage, every aspect of Sachs’ artistic output is a hobbled-together approximation of a real life thing. These objects — a space suit cooling system that includes a five-gallon sports cooler, a landing system that many will recognize as the arcade game Lunar Lander — are wonderfully playful. The mock-seriousness of the entire endeavor has a Life Aquatic-like quality of matching a merry band of misfits with charming lo-fi special effects, cartoonish drawings and stop-motion animation.

As for narrative, A Space Program is light on that front. The movie starts off with a lot of stagecraft, introducing the Sachs studio members and their various material specialties: steel, plywood, Tyvek, epoxy and literature, to name a few. There’s plenty of dramatic lighting, official-looking ID badges and a stern-voiced narrator who fills us in on anything we might not know about plywood, Tyvek, epoxy and other Sachs studio methodologies.