Blue Sky movie review & film summary (1994)
As the movie opens, the Marshalls are transferred to Alabama, where the base commander, Vince Johnson (Powers Boothe) finds himself at the officers' club doing a dance with Carly that is just this side of vertical foreplay. He soon assigns Hank Marshall to fly out to Nevada to supervise some underground testing, and Hank, who is not a fool, asks his wife, "How did David steal Bathsheba away from her husband?" The answer, of course, is that he sent him away to do battle. And in Nevada Hank finds himself concerned with the safety of underground tests, especially after one vents radioactivity into the atmosphere, and probably poisons two civilian cowboys who are too close. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Army, caught in a Cold War frenzy, don't want any publicity about the bad side-effects of testing. And meanwhile Gen. Johnson has been doing a little underground testing of his own, with Carly Marshall.
Johnson's wife (Carrie Snodgress) knows exactly what is going on. She's been through this before. "You know what you mean to me?" she asks Carly. "One less Christmas card." But when her son (Chris O'Donnell) and the Marshall's older daughter (Amy Locane) also begin to wander off-limits together, it all becomes very tricky, especially after Marshall flies back to Alabama with a demand that the government look for the two contaminated cowboys. For reasons both public and private, Johnson has him committed to a mental hospital. And that barely scratches the surface of a plot which also invests a lot of energy into remembering what it was like to live in the 1950s.
"Blue Sky" is the last film directed by the late Tony Richardson, whose work includes "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," "Tom Jones" and "The Loved One." It was caught in the financial collapse of Orion Pictures, and is only now being released, after a couple of years on the shelf. That means it was made before Tommy Lee Jones got his Oscar nominations for "Under Siege" and "The Fugitive" and became a hot star. Here we can see him in a subdued role, as an intelligent, principled man who is married to a troubled woman, but loves her.
