Although it's rooted in fact, this is a feel-good family melodrama of the most calculatingly saccharine kind. The action revolves around Alex D Linz, the neglected son of widowed, expatriate German rocket scientist James Woods, who finds solace from troubled home life in a lab monkey named Mac, who is being trained for a pioneering mission. There was an opportunity here to produce a junior version of The Right Stuff and enthuse children about the Nasa space programmes of the early 1960s. But, instead, we get a simian reworking of such "boy and his dog" movies as Old Yeller.

In the 1960s a young woman works at NASA as an animal trainer responsible for the chimpanzee who will go into space.