Five-time Emmy winner Paul Devlin’s BLAST! came about at the last minute, on the afterthought suggestion of his astrophysicist brother Mark. With no guarantee how things would turn out or, indeed, if anything would happen at all, this filmmaker accompanied the scientific team north of the Arctic Circle, where Sweden’s Esrange Space Center had been selected for the length of its summer daylight, air currents and latitude.

For all intensive purposes run by Mark and Barth Netterfield, professors at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, respectively, and staffed pretty much by graduate students paid in hands-on experience, the project is explained for the layman in clear terms and wonderfully visualized by the Artifactuality graphics of Christine Moh and Bob Mickens. Without astronomical funding, and with logistical support from NASA, at relatively low cost and infinitely less time consumption than a standard rocket program, it proposes using a high-altitude balloon to carry aloft and sustain a telescope for four days above all but one-half percent of Earth’s atmosphere.

Its structure and mirror designed by Mark and assembled in situ by student-helpers and technicians, BLAST is the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, to capture and star-camera record on twin hard drives the faintest light from very distant, and receding, galaxies and gas-nests of nascent stars. Linking time and light-speed in the distance measured as light-years, success in the endeavor will allow humanity to peer back billions of years, closer to a uniform universe now become four percent coalesced matter connected in an endless, graphically imaged web.

The culmination of a half-dozen years’ personal sacrifice on its planners’ part, the actual putting into practice turns out not all that simple. Time indicated by titles, the launch is held hostage by unfavorable weather, mechanical glitches like a flatbed-crane that refuses to release, and failures in the focusing mechanism; and then the payload landing on Victoria Island in northern Canada is off target, so an Inuit hunter must guide and protect them from predators. When it is decided to reassemble and try again at the opposite pole, the most isolated research station on the planet at Antarctica’s McMurdo, the landing parachute wind-drags everything over a hundred twenty featureless miles and the hard drives’ pressure vessel appears to be irrecoverable from any one of interchangeable crevasses.

These literally worldwide adventures and mishaps are interspersed with the commentaries of those involved, with concentration on Mark and Netterfield. Despite an asserted de-emphasis on talking heads, that is what these are, informal and unprodded by disembodied questions, joking around but serious and seriously anxious about the outcome, working or relaxing at an improbable bowling alley.

Without narration, BLAST! is easy to follow thanks to clear, and clearly simplified, briefings. Lens flare, lines, graininess and all, it seems video home movie, one part of which captures the scientists’ seeking light-information which, “unfortunately, can’t go through air,” from the most distant, therefore oldest, sources. The other basic part concerns the longstanding debate between faith and reason, religion and science, First Cause God and spontaneous Big Bang. The low-key spokesmen for these two views are Devlin and convinced Christian Netterfield, though it is understandably only the former, director Devlin’s brother, whose outside personal life gets included. Cloying home movies of his wife Jennifer and children back in Philadelphia, at a Thanksgiving meal daddy must miss, the two boys not enthralled by a cellphone call from the ends of the earth, indicate what investigators give up in the experimental pursuit of knowledge (“man is curious by nature”).

Bearded while away, face and head shaved at home, Mark Devlin is not an antagonist; neither is Netterfield, who finds his God in the cosmos’s “astounding breathtaking” order within variety. It is the former, in the end, who will almost admit Something, or Someone, in the amazing results.

Unplanned, strung along its own chronological progression, filmed without a lot of money, BLAST! is too unstructured as “Astrophysics Indiana Jones Style.” It ends up being neither cliffhanger, adventure, straight science nor philosophical dialogue. 

(Released by Devlin Productions; not rated by MPAA.)