This is an excellent movie insofar as telling the history of Mission Control goes. I have no issue with this.
However, by giving this movie a 1 star (awful) rating, I hope that the producers will take notice of what can only be called a gross oversight - an error that they made over and over and over and over and over (30+ times in 15 minutes, until I stopped counting).
The country that launched Sputnik was not "Russia." It was THE SOVIET UNION (CCCP).
While Russia was the largest constituent state of the Soviet Union, it is no more correct to say that the two are the same than it would be to say that Texas is the USA or England is the United Kingdom. They're simply not. While casually people may make the error, for a history documentary to make it is just shockingly bad.
Many of the key people involved in the Soviet space program were non-Russian and/or came from places not in Russia. This includes tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Balts, and Central Asians. Koryolov, the Soviet chief designer and pretty much the man responsible for the whole program was half Ukrainian. NONE of the rockets, patches, etc had "Russia" written on them. It was all CCCP.
By perpetuating the myth that "the soviet union=Russia", this documentary gives undue support to dictators like Putin while keeping deserved praise from non-Russians who earned it. Let's be clear--the Soviet Union was a place of many great evils. But, "credit where credit was due"--there were also some great successes.
I can't for the life of me imagine how this script passed through even the most basic fact checking. Shockingly ignorant on this point.
Though, as others have pointed out, the rest of the movie is excellent. 8.8 excellent? Probably not, but still worth a view.
