Star Men review – desert road trip, space odyssey

This charming documentary charts the progress of four retired astronomers as they talk about life, the universe and everything under the stars

There is enormous charm and food for thought in Alison Rose's documentary about four retired, snowy-haired English astronomers and their road-trip reunion in the American south-west; they are recreating a journey they took together decades previously, as gung-ho twentysomething students at the California Institute of Technology.

Donald Lynden-Bell, Roger Griffin, Neville "Nick" Woolf and Wallace Sargent are four eminently likable and distinguished academics who appear like gentleman explorers as they tackle a hike in the burning sun that might dismay people much younger. Their final goal is the remarkable Rainbow Bridge in Utah; on the way, they chat to each other and Rose about astronomy, the unimaginably vast reaches of the universe, about life on other planets and on our own. Oddly, the film reminded me of Patricio Guzmin's Nostalgia for the Light (2010), about astronomers in 1970s Chile, who found in this discipline an escape from tyranny. Star Men isn't political like this, but it finds an extraterrestrial strangeness or majesty in the American wilderness, just as Guzmin found it in Chile's Atacama desert.