Man on a Mission

Details

Man on a Mission
Directed by Mike Woolf
First Run Features
Opens January 13

Related Content

• STAYING POSITIVE
  February 22, 2012
• 'Que Bajo'
  October 26, 2011
• The Wise Kids
  March 14, 2012
• For Homesick Angelenos: The 5 Best Things To Eat at Florencia 13
  April 17, 2012
• My 5 Favorite NYC Breakfast Spots
  February 26, 2012

More About

• Richard Garriott
• Austin
• International Space Station
• Space Technology
• Science and Technology

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

The man in the title is British-American multimillionaire Richard Garriott, who made his pile designing PC "virtual world" role-playing games, most famously the best-selling Ultima series. Garriott has since used his money to create his own virtual world, dressing in Renaissance festival duds, taking the alter-ego "Lord British," and constructing an eccentric mansion, "Brittania Manor," in Austin. The mission of the title is Garriott's most elaborate flight of fancy, a commercial trip on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2008, a 10-day voyage that included a visit to the International Space Station. This undertaking came with a $30M price tag and required a year of training, extensively documented here. The one possible point of interest in this, Garriott's vanity travelogue, is the footage that he brings back from his stellar cruise, but it's certain that enthusiasts of space travel will have seen finer, more professional versions of these images elsewhere. It is difficult, in fact, to discern who the intended audience is for Man on a Mission, save aspirant cosmonauts with a fortune to burn up in the atmosphere or perhaps the Garriott family. It should be mentioned that Garriott's father, Owen, was himself a Skylab astronaut, a fact of which much is made—but that only more obviously shows Man on a Mission for what it is: a puffed-up home movie.