Billy Bob Thornton stars as aersopace engineer in new film

The Astronaut Farmer, the new film from the Polish brothers, Michael and Mark, inhabits a place of peculiar distinction in the world of film. It is both unremarkable and thoroughly unbelievable at the same time. Allow me to elaborate.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Charlie Farmer, a down on his luck former soon-to-be astronaut and current farmer who never gave up on his dreams of some day reaching outer space. So what does he do? He builds a gigantic rocket in his barn and straps a home made space capsule on top of it.

In terms of the basics of the film, we have all seen this before: local idiosyncratic genius comes up with hare-brained scheme. The townspeople scoff and some faceless government entity (in this case, the FAA) tries to stop him because they cannot understand his genius or appreciate his dream.

"This is the classic story of the little guy against the system. I love that theme always... It's a pretty subversive movie in some ways. It really does take some stabs at the government" said Thornton.

Despite the initial obstacles faced by Farmer, after much perseverance and a doozy of a Deus ex Machina, our hero is vindicated and gets to go on The Tonight Show. Hope I didn't give too much away.

At issue is the believability of it all. Charlie Farmer is, apparently, the single greatest aeronautical engineer in the history of the world. He and his son manage to design and build one of the most complex pieces of machinery ever conceived, and they do it in their back yard on, relative to how these things are typically done, a shoestring budget.

Now, crazier things have certainly happened in movies before, but I just did not buy it this time. And I would imagine, much like a CS major trying to watch the hacking in Swordfish, AE majors will find the depiction of their field either laughable or infuriating.

One of the big problems is just the structure of the film. Things seem to just kind of happen. Characters come and go, and then things happen to them that I guess we were supposed to feel something about, but it is not like they ever really did anything to make them feel like actual people that we should actually worry about.

Case in point: Bruce Willis, in a role that screams, "Where's my check?" just sort of shows up, and, oh yeah, it turns out he's an old buddy of Billy Bob's from back in his space program days.

That's neat, I guess. A little context would have been nice, though.

With the exception of Billy Bob Thornton, the cast is unremarkable. Virginia Madsen plays Charlie's devoted wife, Audie, and Max Theriot plays his devoted son, Shepard.

There are also two adorable little girls, played by the Polish brothers' daughters, and some town locals, and some government types rounding things out.

According to the Polish brothers, the entire film was originaly set to be done independently.

"When it started off we were going to do this independent. With family, it's free... We wrote [our daughters' roles] according to their strengths," said Mark Polish.

Though with a $13 million budget they were able to get a few stars more well-known than their daughters, there were still only a handfull of big stars. No one is bad, per se, but there is just not much for most of them to do.

Every character in the movie seems to exist for the sole purpose of providing a foil for Billy Bob Thornton, who turns out a good, if not particularly memorable performance as a slight variation on the take no crap anti-establishment type that he's been playing lately.

"This is the kind of role I always wanted to play. This is sort of a family guy," Thornton said.

The Astronaut Farmer isn't a bad movie. It's alright.

It even manages to pull it together for a really rather good last third, but it just seems to be going through the motions.

It feels like nobody really cared all that much, and that indifference shines through the entire movie.