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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Hbo Home Video
Salesrank: 12430
Released: January 29, 2008 |
| Our Price: $6.99 |
| Used Price: $2.98 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Picturehouse and HBO Films present a story about Hal Hefner, an ordinary, shy 15 year-old boy who's struggling to make it through High School. On top of his parents' recent divorce and an obsessive- compulsive, kleptomaniac older brother, Hal has a stuttering problem. In spite of this speech impediment, the high school debate team star, Ginny Ryerson, invites Hal to join the team. Stumbling his way to the championship, Hal falls in love, gains confidence and ultimately, realizes that love and life should not be rocket science.
DVD Features:
Featurette
Music Video
Description of Rocket Science:
The first fiction film from Jeffrey Blitz has nothing to do with aeronautical engineering and everything to do with finding your voice. For 15-year-old New Jersey-based Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), that’s a tall order. He’s bright, but he stutters. To complicate matters, his parents are on the outs and his brother, Earl (the droll Vincent Piazza), is a bully. Just when he needs a guardian angel most, one materializes in his midst. Self-possessed schoolmate Ginny (Camp's Anna Kendrick) sees something in Hal no one else does. She's convinced he'll make a terrific debate team partner, so she recruits him. Unaccustomed to female attention, he opts to give it a try. Turns out, there's more to Ginny than meets the eye, but there's also more to Hal. When she double-crosses the lovelorn lad, he finds a brilliant way to get her back. It isn't about revenge, but self-respect. In Blitz's Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, the action revolves around the National Spelling Bee, but the director demonstrates greater interest in his subjects than the outcome of the contest. With its absurdist tone, Rocket Science may look different, but follows a similar trajectory. Unlike The Karate Kid and other teen favorites where an outcast triumphs over adversity and gets the girl, things aren't so simple in this case. As with its hero, Rocket Science can be awkward--there are too many subplots--but the throwaway gags, most involving Hal's buddy, Lewis (Josh Kay), are priceless, and Eef Barzelay's ukelele-based score is a nice touch. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Rocket Science Reviews:
could have been better. 
2009-11-22 - This film carried an awkward unfinished feel throughout most of the picture. As a viewer I find it unlikely that this tone was intentional and more likely a product of an overplayed, semi inappropriate soundtrack that instead of added to the character of the film irritated the ears of my girlfriend and myself. The soundtrack felt as if it were a poor attempt at a Wes Andersonesque inclusion of pop music, but after the film's failure with its first addition of song it proceeds to repeatedly beat them into the heads of its audience, pulverizing their brains with The Violent Femmes and some other song about the "unknown".
If you can get past the terribly placed soundtrack of the film and actually find some interest in the cute but lackluster story, you will undoubtedly loose it when you forget what the protagonist is trying to iterate through his over dramatized borderline illegible stutters, which are constantly present throughout the piece except when he is either singing or whispering (which is only present in short bits and pieces).
The only character with any depth or sense of motive is the protagonist. Though all the other character's have their own interesting and unique sense of personality they are also quite extreme personalities with no understanding as to why they are so extreme, and the viewer is forced to just accept their obtuse extremities as normal... which was difficult.
somewhat boring 
2009-08-19 - This isn't a very good movie for a couple of reasons-
One, it's not a memorable storyline to begin with. Come on, a plot that focuses on *debating* and debate clubs?
The kid who plays the lead character has a speech problem. He can't speak clearly around girls, or whenever he's nervous. The girl he tries making out with in the janitors closet talks at lightning speed because she is a huge part of this debate team that she wanted the boy to join.
It's just not a very good plot if you ask me.
Perhaps I just didn't get the appeal of this one (having never been a part of a debate team and never having trouble speaking clearly) but to me this was one lousy movie based on the storyline alone. A terribly uninteresting storyline, and nothing that's seriously worth your time. The humor they tried throwing in at certain spots (such as the one kid wearing a bra and the female neighbor spotting this through the window) was decent enough, but not frequent enough to save the film I'm afraid.
Rent the movie because people apparently like it, but I don't see the appeal of it.
It's not fish, as you can imagine. 
2009-06-11 - One of those quirky teenage dark comedies out right now, Rocket Science makes me realize how old I'm getting.
Yeah, I'm out of touch, but somehow this movie movie managed to strike a chord, because we all have baggage and worry about fitting in at different times in our lives.
In Rocket Science, a bright young boy, Hal Hefner, fettered by a stuttering problem- which actually came off more like a hesitation- finds himself approached by the over achieving debate team genius, Ginny. After a devastating loss at states the year before in which her bf/partner went stunningly silent in the middle of the game, she's looking for a new recruit. Taking the idea that someone so handicapped in their speaking must have something to give, she singles out Hal.
Hal, of course, is stunned and completely in love. She begins to mold him, even though he never seems to get past his log jammed word impediment, which is really what we're waiting for.
And then she abdicates to a private school.
It is then we begin to realize, she's set him up- and thereby the entire PHS debate team that failed her so miserably the year before.
But Hal isn't taking it lying down. He tracks down Ben Wekselbaum, the prodigy who quit last year and in the final showdown at states this year ... they get eliminated on a technicality.
Yeah, this isn't an overcoming odds/ guy gets the gal in the end typa movie. And it's why it could never be a hit film.
Still it has it's moments. Literally, Hal drags his recently split father's baggage around through out the film- I like that kind of obvious metaphor. He also finds a way of exacting a bit of revenge on Ginny by bringing Ben- the bf who broke her heart- back into the picture. And he dramatically displays his pent up anger in one blazing drunken moment when he hurls a cello into a window of her home.
Oh and the Mom "dating" the single dad Asian man next door? Nice touch. Kids don't have a clue why adults do half the things we do, that was a pretty good way of showing how bizarre it comes across to them.
Mom to Korean American Lover who brought over dinner:
"ooo is this a traditional Korean dish? It smells so exotic"
Lover: "It's Tuna Casserole."
I liked this one despite it not going where I think it should have.
But hey, Hal does finally get his pizza in the end- because it's not fish as you can imagine. There is that.
Then Again Maybe It Is... 
2008-10-29 - This is a fine little movie. Start with the soundtrack, Clem Snide, singing some of the group's own and then, over the closing credits, The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Trust me, it only sounds absurd before you've seen the movie.
Which is about a stuttering kid who tries to find -- in no particular order -- his voice, love, himself. Triumph on all fronts would be too simple and, as we all know, Rocket Science isn't simple. But it is full of turns and, looking back on the movie a couple days later, while many of those turns surprise, none feel false, arbitrary or forced. It's a scary future out there, but at the end of Rocket Science, Hal (or, as his annoying but loyal big brother would prefer to call him, Penelope) has made an impressive start.
Funny and true, right down to three pieces of pizza at closing on a New Jersey boardwalk, this movie should not be missed.
Small, simple and subtle: a very nice film about growing up
2008-08-08 - A small and well-made film about a boy who stutters and stands back from life and what led him to engage.
I liked this movie quite a bit. It's not groundbreaking or classic or amazing -- and the basic premise of a kid with speech problems who ends up on a debate team due to a crush on a deceitful girl is a bit implausible -- but it fits very nicely into the genre of "Sundance-style" quirky films about ordinary folk with issues finding their way. I did think that the omniscient voiceover was a bit out of place and unnecessary.
Still, the film features some excellent performances, clever dialogue, engaging cinematography, and an enjoyable soundtrack. Quite good, well worth watching -- and very likely to mark an early point in a number of excellent careers: especially those of the director Jeffrey Blitz and the lead actor Reece Thompson.
