The Right Stuff

This should have been two seasons or a 10 episode limited run. Big fan of this era. The book explores the test pilots like Yeager and the journey to the space program and then the Mercury program. So much missing it needed to explore.

How is it that writers & directors continue to try to pass off alternative/revisionist crap as historically accurate? While the events themselves may be accurate, the portrayals of the astronauts, NASA employees, their combined families, etc., is severely myopic and filtered through today's politically correct & fragile viewpoints. None of them were perfect, none of their families were...but they did what had to be done at a time when death could be all but guaranteed. I give it a D for this very narrow and shallow take on a classic novel & reality.

This series is a trip into the Disney Alternate Cinematic Universe where the Mercury astronauts are actually self-absorbed millennial frat boys. I truly believe the the Wolfe book and the 1983 film sat unread and unviewed next to the writer's lap top. You can avoid the rest if you wish.

Yet another casualty of the tendency of modern writers being unable to identify with intelligent, educated, accomplished people with initiative. As a result, this iteration all but ignores their skills and accomplishments and instead focuses on portraying them as undisciplined jerks becasue the writers can't distinguish between traits like competitive versus combative, or driven versus reckless. Instead of celebrating the swell of patriotism and technological innovation that occurred during the formation and growth of the space program we instead get a boring melodrama about how white men are jerks, even when they are nice. Were these men perfect? No. People as driven and brazen as them are inherently flawed when it comes to social interaction, but that's not the same as being unruly. The misguided focus is so bad we see nothing depicting the reasons why the Mercury Seven were chosen. It's "look at what a bunch of jerks theses guys are" and suddenly BAM! "We've got our seven". Uh, what? Read the book and watch the film instead. Both captured that time much more faithfully while neither focusing on the astronaut's flaws nor sugar-coating them.

First off, I can barely tell any of the Mercury 7 apart. They cast a bunch of absolutely generic 2020s White Hollywood Guys and that's not what real people are like, what the actual astronauts were like or even the cast of the 1983 film.

The women were better, and the NASA administrators were more interestingly cast and better acted if extremely dumbed down and simplified.

So, so, so dumbed down and simplified. Just as you think they will hit on some great topic around the technology, of building an agency all but from scratch (NACA existed and became NASA but... ignored also) of the choices in boosters, in ground vs pilot controls... they just move on and barely mention it again.

We even have a model for this in The 1983 Movie. Sure, there are other ways to do it, and me, I'd love a more boffin-oriented (nerds, engineers...) show, like parts of From The Earth To The Moon, but even sticking to astronauts I guess its been 40 years, sure let's do a remake.

Why such an absolutely lifeless remake? Why are the stakes presented in a way to make them so absolutely uninteresting, why is the drama amped up to the point that these top-of-their-game professionals are embarrassing children who cannot do their jobs?

Seriously, it gets a point because nice VFX (not gaudy, believable) and spaceships and airplanes but without that, about some other industry or if I was not an aerospace nerd, I'd have dropped somewhere in the middle of the second episode.