The Dish Reaching for the Stars from Down Under

The Dish is set at the satellite dish facility. Located in the middle of a sheep paddock, near the small town of Parkes in Australia. Though none of the action takes place off the Earth, or even outside Australia, The Dish remains one of the sweetest, if also the most quirky, homage to the spirit of space exploration ever filmed.

The time is July, 1969 and the occasion is the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Dish at Parkes will play a crucial role in transmitting sound, TV, and telemetry from the Apollo space craft to Earth.

Leading the wonderful cast is Sam Neil, playing Cliff Buxton, the director of the Dish facility. For him, the voyage of Apollo 11 is bitter sweet. His wife, who had so looked forward to seeing the lunar voyage, had recently died. He is well supported by Kevin Harrington, playing a sarcastic engineer named Ross Mitchell, Tom Long playing a love struck math wiz named Glenn Latham, and Pat Warburton, playing the bear-like, Clark Kent looking NASA minder named Al Burnett.

While power outages, loss of signal, and a big wind storm threaten the mission of the Dish, it is the various quirky characters that make the movie. Latham is in love with a girl named Janine, played by Eliza Sznoret, the sister of the facility’s rather dim security guard, and has no earthly idea about what to do about it. Mitchell and Burnett clash, though the bickering is made funny by Burnett’s inability to understand Mitchell’s Australian idioms. And yet they all come together when they need to.

The town, of course, is caught up in the excitement. The Mayor, played by Roy Billing, knows that his future political career depends on how well the Dish does. His son, played by Carl Snell, a sharp lad, can spout off Apollo trivia as if he worked for NASA. There were millions of boys like that in 1969. His daughter, played by Lenka Kripac, apparently the town radical, has a dim view of the whole expedition. "If you ask me it's the most chauvinistic exercise in the history of the world,” she retorts.

Without missing a beat, her mother replies, “That’s why nobody asks you.”