The Dish is set at the satellite dish facility 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, 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, a sharp lad, can spout off Apollo trivia as if he worked
for NASA. His daughter, 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.”
Still, with the Dish transmitting the television pictures of the first
footsteps on another planet, even the radical is struck with awe. As was the
whole world.