Name - For All Mankind
Released - 2019
Creators - Ronald D. Moore / Matt Wolpert / Ben Nedivi
After finishing watching the second series of Foundation which had a pretty great ending, I decided to continue my sci-fi fix with For All Mankind. That was a mistake! OMG!
I had no idea what the series was when I first heard about it and was not sure what to expect. However, after watching a series based on the sci-fi ideas of Asimov, it would be a hard act to follow.
<< contains spoilers >>
So the first episode started and then I could see it is one of those revisionist sci-fi programmes where they try to make a twist on what happened, I sighed. Usually these are really bad to watch in my experience. They are seem designed to try to give credibility to the given narrative that is being twisted, which makes for some really cringeworthy TV.
So here, apparently the former Soviet Union has won the race to the moon and this is a revisionist version of what happened and how NASA felt about it. Considering they already sent the monkey into space, I can't see how this would have anyway been a big deal.
The first episode is then about how (badly) the NASA team took the news and they started hating on Russia, communism etc etc. and drank alot. Many of the astronauts are feeling down and glum and not sure they can continue now they weren't the first on the moon. How could America not win the space race?!
Ironically, this show paradoies real life and you can see how glum Armstrong looks after apparently landing on the moon supposedly for real. The astronauts in For All Mankind are really hard to like and get attached to their story. They dont have an Armstrong or Buzz appeal to them.
As the first episode progressed, my bordom level starting reaching danger levels and it was like watching paint dry a real Nasa rocket launch which is excruciatingly boring.
This was parodied in the Simpsons episode where they desperately try to change the channel from another boring space launch:
I found myself skimming through the episode to see if anything interesting would happen. It didn't. I then skimmed through some further episodes and the storylines looked even more boring than the first episode which takes some doing.
It is a shame, because there are some far more interesting storylines they could have pursued than this which just didn't work for me.
One of my favorite Nasa movies is the classic Capricorn One starring some Hollywood heavyweights like OJ Simpson and Elliott Gould who have a great storyline about Nasa faking the mars landing.
After watching this, I needed to go back and watch an episode of Buck Rogers to regain my sanity and feel better again. Luckily there are some more sci-fi shows on Apple TV and I am checking out Infiltration now.
Thanks for reading.
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Credits:
The title image was created by myself in canva and using the CineTV logo and image source.
I do not own any video copyrights. The videos are owned by their respective copyright holders.
Used under fair-use section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.
