THE year before Apollo 11's successful mission to the moon, Robert Altman directed lames Caan and Robert Duvall in Countdown. The 1968 film stuck to the technology of its day, pumping up the drama with a somewhat outlandish mission plan: astronaut Lee Stegler and his shelter pod are sent to the moon's surface on separate flights and Stegler must find the shelter once he lands if he is to survive. The film played host to characters you might conceivably bump into at the supermarket: the astronauts, engineers and bureaucrats have families and everyday troubles not so very different from your own. Proximo is Countdown for the 21st century. Sarah Loreau, an astronaut played brilliantly by Eva Green, is given a last-minute opportunity to join a Mars precursor mission to the International Space Station. Loreau's training and preparation are impressively captured on location at European Space Agency facilities in Cologne, Germany - with a cameo from French astronaut Thomas Pesquet -and in Star City, the complex outside Moscow that is home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. She is ultimately headed to launch from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
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