June 10th, 2008
Space, Condensed
So I watched the first two hours of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, the hotly anticipated (and heavily promoted) documentary series airing on the Discovery Channel last night. And I was pretty darned excited about it. I’ve been a space nut since before I entered kindergarten. I can tell you where on the NASA timeline I was born (two weeks before Apollo XIII launched). I’ve heard the stories before, and I’ve seen a lot of the footage, but it didn’t matter: this is the tale of humanity’s first shaky steps off the planet, a turning point in the entire history of the species. A story like that cannot be told too many times.
Guess what? I hated it.
Okay, that’s too strong. I was entertained. I learned a few things. I saw a lot of film that was new to me. I’m sure it looks great in HD. But I was also deeply disappointed.
How can you tell the story of Project Mercury in 56 minutes (minus commercials)? Heck, The Right Stuff needed three hours. Or more to the point, how can you tell the story of the Mercury 7 without letting us see who they were? “John Glenn was the level-headed one” is not sufficient. Almost nothing was said about why these seven men were chosen from the pool of candidates, what training they went through, or how being America’s first astronauts and instant celebrities affected their psyches and their lives.
How can you tell the story of Mercury (or, for that matter, of NASA) without even explaining the space race, for crying out loud? Yuri Gagarin gets about 10 seconds, but without the context of the Cold War and the devastating psychological blow of Sputnik (which gets no mention at all), the mad rush to reach the Moon seems meaningless. JFK’s pledge to reach the Moon by the end of the sixties is mentioned, and we get a few “boy were we surprised” reactions, but again there is no context given. Why such a short window? What was the effect on NASA? On public opinion? What happened when Kennedy died (again, no mention of that event)?
Instead, we jump from mission to mission, with the bulk of the time devoted to whatever near-disaster was averted on each. That’s understandable; it is television, after all. But without context, how are people in the audience—especially young viewers—supposed to care?
The filmmakers conducted a lot of interviews, from Gene Kranz to Glenn to the big catch, Neil Armstrong. But rather than letting these people tell the story, they have hacked the interviews to ribbons, sound bites of a single sentence each, and intercut them with quick edits of original footage, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, all linked together by tense narration and action-movie music. It’s non-stop, it’s exhausting, and it doesn’t do justice to the incredible achievement of the Mercury Program.
Project Gemini, the subject of the second hour, seemed to fare better. In particular, the segment on Gemini IV and NASA’s first spacewalk showed some real depth, as did the dual Gemini VI/VII rendezvous mission. But still there was crucial context missing. What happened in the period between Mercury and Gemini? Nothing, apparently. Was NASA on schedule? Was there opposition? How much did it cost? Why were the Gemini missions conducted with two astronauts, and why were such experiments as EVA, rendezvous, and docking considered so important? In short, WHAT WAS THE PLAN FOR REACHING THE MOON? The documentary leaves all these questions unanswered, leaving little but a Cliffs Notes reading of the flights themselves.
Towards the end of the second hour, I began to suspect that this series might really be about Apollo. Perhaps these first two hours were just preliminaries to the main event, something to be dealt with quickly, and now we’ll get to the real meat of the series. I’m going to cling to that, and hope the remaining episodes are more satisfying. If not, I guess it’ll be time to dig out my DVD copy of From the Earth to the Moon.
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Previous Comments...
Sorry it was such a disappointment. It takes a certain kind of “not getting it” to take something as exciting as the space race and the early days of NASA and make it dull.
Great review.
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