Mars (miniseries)
This has been sitting on my DVR for a binge watch, and I finally got a chance. It's a "docu-drama" miniseries, which uses real life scientists and others to comment about the realities of what it will take to get to Mars, jumping forward 30 years to scenes from a fictional mission. This is an interesting way to illustrate just how difficult the entirety of space history has been, and that it's not necessarily going to be all that much easier with better tech.
I actually think I would have liked it better if it had been more of a straight fictional series mixed with a couple of documentary scenes, mainly because the documentary scenes are taken as factually correct, but there are errors in the dramatic scenes that had me cringing a bit.
For example, when something on the mission goes horribly wrong and there are deaths (this isn't a spoiler, there are going to be deaths on this sort of mission), the board of the multi-national government and business venture financing things meets to discuss whether or not to continue or abort the mission. One person actually says public support is down due to the deaths, and it's not like the Apollo missions where no one died. [...] The crew of Apollo 1 died in a training accident, but I guess that doesn't count for the docu-drama's purpose since they were on the ground, but it damn sure did at the time, and delayed the program. If it was "just a movie" I'd twitch and move on, but this was a NatGeo series and they should know better.
I liked the start of the series, but the longer the mission went on, the more the cracks in the logic showed up. Though if you can just watch it as a sci fi movie, it would be better than some of them that try to be true to the facts. This isn't up to the level of detail as The Martian, but even the book and movie had to fudge things to create a situation where someone could be stranded on Mars.
Something subtle that I did like was in the scenes before launch, you see the six crew members with national flags on their jackets. Afterward, there's no reference to which country they're from, they're just the crew chosen by a government/private companies venture. They're from Earth. Then they're Martians. Though this is slightly undone by both the commander and 2IC being American. One of those slots would almost certainly be Russian or Chinese.
Problematic yet still enjoyable for the most part.
I actually think I would have liked it better if it had been more of a straight fictional series mixed with a couple of documentary scenes, mainly because the documentary scenes are taken as factually correct, but there are errors in the dramatic scenes that had me cringing a bit.
For example, when something on the mission goes horribly wrong and there are deaths (this isn't a spoiler, there are going to be deaths on this sort of mission), the board of the multi-national government and business venture financing things meets to discuss whether or not to continue or abort the mission. One person actually says public support is down due to the deaths, and it's not like the Apollo missions where no one died. [...] The crew of Apollo 1 died in a training accident, but I guess that doesn't count for the docu-drama's purpose since they were on the ground, but it damn sure did at the time, and delayed the program. If it was "just a movie" I'd twitch and move on, but this was a NatGeo series and they should know better.
I liked the start of the series, but the longer the mission went on, the more the cracks in the logic showed up. Though if you can just watch it as a sci fi movie, it would be better than some of them that try to be true to the facts. This isn't up to the level of detail as The Martian, but even the book and movie had to fudge things to create a situation where someone could be stranded on Mars.
Something subtle that I did like was in the scenes before launch, you see the six crew members with national flags on their jackets. Afterward, there's no reference to which country they're from, they're just the crew chosen by a government/private companies venture. They're from Earth. Then they're Martians. Though this is slightly undone by both the commander and 2IC being American. One of those slots would almost certainly be Russian or Chinese.
Problematic yet still enjoyable for the most part.