Space Cowboys is Clint Eastwood’s farewell to summer blockbusters

Clint Eastwood has been directing and occasionally starring in fall movies for the better part of the past quarter-century. Almost everything he’s made since 2003’s Mystic River has been released in that awards-movie corridor between September and late December, and even when the movies themselves didn’t turn out to be Oscar projects, they tended to have an elegiac, autumnal tone befitting a filmmaker so attuned to the nuances of aging, regrets, and American tragedy. But in his (relative) youth, Clint Eastwood used to make summer movies — popular entertainments in the pre-superhero era. In keeping with his later-period tendency toward movies that work as farewells to genres, historical eras, and himself, his August 2000 film Space Cowboys feels, with 25 years of hindsight, like his farewell to the traditional mass-appeal summer movie.