Reentry
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REENTRYReviews · listings · spoilers sold separately
Primary criticDelvina SorrThe Kerbin Herald · weekends

MSC cinematic universe

Not a database. A verdict factory.

Box office in kerbucks. Stars out of five. Devastatingly fair to bad films — unexpectedly harsh on good ones. Lore sourced from the Melody Space Center program reference (v8) and whatever KerbTab is yelling about this week.

Coming soon

Production slate · rumors verified where possible

  • In development

    The Specification

    Drama · Procedural · TBD — not yet attached

    "Somebody signed off on it. That’s what we need to find out."

    A procedural drama about the docking specification failure that brought down Basic Station — told from three simultaneous perspectives: the NASA interface standards team who wrote the spec, the KerbalX engineer who signed off on the as-built port, and the internal KIA analyst who opened the monitoring file afterwards. Described in trade coverage as “a space program procedural in the mode of a legal thriller.” No explosions. No speeches. Mostly documents, arguments about tolerances, and one kerbal who knew something was wrong and didn’t say it loudly enough.

    Screenplay in third draft. KerbalX has filed a pre-production legal objection. The production company has stated they have “a great deal of documentation.” Delvina Sorr is already thinking about the review.

  • In development

    FARVIEW: Solar Orbit

    Documentary · Unattached — Gnosis City slate

    "A newspaper bought a telescope to photograph a pothole. The telescope ended up in solar orbit. This is that story."

    A documentary about FARVIEW-1 and the improbable chain of events that put a KeedMartin deep-space probe in solar orbit: Kerbin First Daily's POTHOLE module, CLEARVIEW-1's optics heritage, the Farewell Shot, and the anomalous point source that NASA will not explain. Delvina Sorr has been asked to review a film that does not exist yet.

    Development — Gnosis City slate. No director attached. Delvina Sorr has noted that if this gets made it will be 'either the best or the worst thing to come out of this program.'

  • In development

    MunShot: First Light

    Adventure · Program drama · Announced as “Phase 1 wraps”

    "Two contractors. One Mun window. Zero narrative restraint."

    Loosely tracks MunShot Phase 1 planning — R-SLS2 heritage vs KerbalX solving onboard crew control. Not affiliated with NASA procurement; lawyers watching.

    Development · tied to phase milestones

  • In development

    SOLARCOM: Static

    Sci‑fi · Mystery · Indie pickup — Gnosis City slate

    "The relays are up. Nobody will say what they are for."

    SOLARCOM network completion reframed as conspiracy procedural. Administrator played as kindly evasive. Third act argues with orbital mechanics on purpose.

    Lore booklet: NASA declined to specify eventual comms target

Featured reviews

Released titles · Delvina Sorr scores

Apogee

Drama · Dir. Brenn Ollander · 2023 · 138 min

"The sky was never the limit."

3/5
Delvina Sorr

Plot

KerbalOrbit dramatized. Rival engineers, renamed Valentina as “Vera Kass.” Orbital mechanics approximately correct. Rooftop reconciliation that didn’t happen. Dialogue not.

Cast

  • Domas Frell (KOEING)Halverd Minn
  • Sita Yong (KerbalX)Pella Orvaine
  • Vera Kass (“Valentina”)Jula Westin
  • Administrator CraneBort Callender

Box office

K§141M gross
K§62M budget

Awards

  • Best Score — KFG
  • Best VFX — KFG
  • Best Picture (lost)
  • Best Director (lost)

Press

“No engineer has ever said ‘we go up so that our children can reach further’ to another engineer. Engineers say things like ‘the delta-v margin is tighter than I’d like.’”
Reentry — Delvina Sorr3/5
“One hundred and thirty-eight minutes of government spending, glamorized. My readers deserve to know their tax funds made this possible.”
Kerbin First Daily — Herschel Tomfry0/5

Forty Seconds

Documentary · Dir. Ammie Voss · 2024 · 94 min

"Eleven failures. One room. No music."

4.5/5
Delvina Sorr

Plot

KerbalX ground control through eleven consecutive landing failures and the twelfth success. No narration. No score for twenty minutes. Twelfth landing in one uncut shot from three angles.

Key subjects

  • Flight Dir. Ossa RenkHerself
  • GNC Lead Tomas WeilHimself
  • Recovery crew chiefHimself

Box office

K§19.7M gross
K§1.1M budget

Awards

  • Best Documentary — KFG
  • Best Picture — KFG
  • Best Editing — KFG
  • Audience Choice — Meridian FF

Press

“It is eleven landing failures and the silence between them, and the twelfth attempt, and what the room sounds like when it works. It is the better film by some distance.”
Reentry — Delvina Sorr4.5/5
“The editing in the terminal descent sequences is, on a technical level, extraordinary.”
Orbital Mechanics Quarterly
New release

Open Door

Drama · Dir. Callum Vestri · 2025 · 121 min

"She went out when the door didn’t work. That’s the whole story."

3.5/5
Delvina Sorr

Plot

A dramatization of MSC-002 — the failed docking, the improvised EVA, the broken airlock, and the return. Three acts: preparation and launch (tense, compressed), the docking failure and the decision to send Valentina out (the film’s best thirty minutes), and the reentry. The fictionalised mission director Orra Venn carries much of the film’s emotional weight and is its most fully drawn character.

Cast

  • Valentina KermanJula Westin
  • Madvis KermanRenn Okafor
  • Dogun KermanPelks Davari
  • Orra Venn (fict. mission dir.)Haleth Grunne
  • KOEING engineer (fict.)Osse Mirren

Box office

K§71M opening weekend
K§198M gross
K§54M budget

Awards

  • Best Actress — Jula Westin, KFG
  • Best Sound — KFG
  • Best Picture — KFG
  • Best Supporting — Haleth Grunne

Controversy

  • Valentina Kerman attended the premiere. She has not spoken publicly about the film. Jula Westin thanked her from the stage. Kerman nodded. KerbTab ran seventeen pieces on the nod.
  • The film depicts the moment of the airlock failure with a prolonged silence and a close-up of Kerman’s visor reflection — a shot that multiple reviewers have called the best single image in any MSC-related film. Kerman has not confirmed whether the moment is accurate. She has not denied it either.
  • Dogun Kerman’s portrayal is almost entirely accurate per his own account. He told KerbTab: “They got the part where I said nothing right. I did say nothing. That’s what there was to do.” Madvis Kerman has not commented on her portrayal.
  • The film’s fictionalised mission director Orra Venn drew comparisons to the real KOEING flight operations lead. KOEING issued a statement saying the character “does not represent any actual employee.” Haleth Grunne was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
  • KerbalX’s communications team asked for script review access before production. The director declined. The station specification failure is depicted accurately and without editorializing, which several observers have noted is somehow more damning than if it had been dramatised.

Press

“Westin finally gets the material she deserved in Apogee and didn’t get. The EVA sequence — thirteen minutes, almost no dialogue — is the best work she has ever done. The film around it is merely very good. The airlock shot will be in film collections for a long time.”
Reentry — Delvina Sorr3.5/5
“The film accurately depicts the docking specification failure. The station’s non-compliant port geometry is shown in a brief but technically correct diagram during the approach sequence. We checked. It is correct. We are as surprised as anyone.”
Orbital Mechanics Quarterly
“They made a film about Valentina Kerman not being able to open a door, and it made almost two hundred million kerbal-squares at the box office. The door outside my office leads to a street with a pothole in it. Nobody has made a film about that. I want the record to reflect this disparity.”
Kerbin First Daily — Herschel Tomfry2/5
“Jula Westin attended the MSC-002 debrief tapes screenings three times before filming the EVA sequence. You can tell. She found something in the footage that wasn’t in the script and put it in her body instead. That is what acting is.”
KerbTab5/5 (for Westin specifically)
New documentary

Two Walks

Documentary · Dir. Ammie Voss · 2025 · 67 min

"The first one was history. The second one was work. You need both."

4/5
Delvina Sorr

Plot

Ammie Voss’s follow-up to Forty Seconds. Structured entirely around the contrast between EVA-001 and EVA-002 — Valentina Kerman’s improvised emergency spacewalk during MSC-002, and Huddin Kerman’s planned array deployment during RESTLESS integration. No narrator, no interviews. Built from available footage: the live broadcast of EVA-001, Huddin Kerman’s Crewgram posts and suit telemetry, mission control audio from both EVAs, and a single extended sequence of the RESTLESS arrays deploying that Voss shot herself from a ground telescope. The final shot is the two visors side by side.

Key subjects

  • Valentina Kerman (archival)EVA-001 footage
  • Huddin Kerman (archival)EVA-002 telemetry + posts
  • Mission control (archival)Both EVA audio
  • RESTLESS arrays (telescope)Filmed by Voss

Box office

K§0.2M opening weekend
K§11.4M gross
K§0.8M budget

Awards

  • Best Short Documentary — KFG
  • Best Editing — KFG

Controversy

  • Huddin Kerman gave Voss access to his personal Crewgram archive and suit telemetry data voluntarily. He said: “She made Forty Seconds. That was enough.” Valentina Kerman did not give access — the EVA-001 material is public broadcast footage, used under fair use provisions.
  • The mission control audio for EVA-002 includes a moment, approximately forty seconds before Huddin confirms array deployment, where a controller says something inaudible and a second controller laughs. Voss left this in the film. Neither controller has identified themselves or explained the moment. The internet has been arguing about it for three weeks.
  • The final side-by-side visor shot was called “manipulative” by one reviewer and “the most honest image in the film” by another. Both are referring to the same shot.
  • KerbTab ran a piece headlined “Ammie Voss has done it again and we will not be calm about this.” Ammie Voss did not respond.

Press

“Voss understands something that most filmmakers covering this program have not grasped: the interesting thing is not the crisis. The interesting thing is what comes after the crisis, when everyone has to go back to work. At 67 minutes it is the right length. It could not be a feature. It should not be a feature. It is exactly what it is.”
Reentry — Delvina Sorr4/5
“The RESTLESS array deployment sequence, filmed from a ground telescope at 47x magnification, is approximately fourteen seconds of footage in the final cut. We spent some time working out the geometry of what Voss must have been pointing at and when. It is correct. She was tracking a 12-metre object at roughly 380 kilometres altitude with a consumer instrument. We have questions about her setup that we would like answered.”
Orbital Mechanics Quarterly
“Ammie Voss has made a film about two people going outside in space — one by accident and one on purpose — and somehow I cried during the part about the solar panels. I cannot fully account for this. The solar panels were fine.”
KerbTab
“A film about spacewalks that does not mention the roads. I note this for the record. The roads continue to exist. Ammie Voss did not cover them. Nobody has covered them. I am still here.”
Kerbin First Daily — Herschel Tomfry2.5/5 — “the telescope footage was good”

Universe catalog

More releases — filler by our standards, canon by the box office

  • LSI: Assembly Required

    3.5/5

    Comedy · Workplace · 2024 · 116 min

    Dir. Merra Choll

    "Three ports free. Four egos. One hub under review."

    Station expansion bureaucracy satire — KeedMartin’s hub spec review as HR incident. Mid-credits stinger: fuel depot still unfunded.

  • VAJE Margin

    2.5/5

    Techno‑thriller · 2023 · 102 min

    Dir. Rikk Torlen

    "Air-augmented. Peer-reviewed. Still angry."

    KeedMartin engineer fights schedule pressure after OMQ publishes corrected figures. Features a fictional SH-4 staging montage set entirely in spreadsheets.

  • Dricken Valley

    4/5

    Satire · 2022 · 98 min

    Dir. Yeff Cordant

    "The pothole was here before the editorial board."

    Kerbin First Daily adjacent mockumentary — roads vs rockets funding debate carried by an immortal pothole outside a newsroom.

  • Mach Three Supper Club

    2/5

    Rom‑com · Disaster · 2024 · 89 min

    Dir. Pane Loor

    "Love is chaotic. Reentry more so."

    Couples therapy aboard a stylized R-SLS2 training mockup; third-act thermal margin argument doubles as relationship metaphor.

  • Marsproof on Hold

    3/5

    Docuseries · Pause · 2023 · 76 min

    Dir. Collective credit · SH‑4 b‑roll unit

    "Paused doesn’t mean quiet."

    Why Marsproof stopped — methane staging, VAJE instrumentation, and an earnest interview with an empty fuel tank assembly.

  • Star Ship Station

    2.5/5

    Disaster · Docudrama · 2021 · 122 min

    Dir. Early Brenn Ollander adjacent unit

    "They printed the legend before they printed the interface spec."

    Basic Station era boosterism cut against internal emails about docking rings. Not officially sanctioned by KerbalX.