Just finished binging the first season of this latest "Landing on Mars" series. My first impression on watching the first episode stuck with my all the way through: it's like Netflix took Katee Sackhoff's "Another Life," replaced the whole cast with better actors and actually read a couple of science books before they wrote the scripts. It's good. Dramatic as you'd expect, but engaging enough. I give it a solid A-.
It's on my list, possibly for starting tomorrow or monday. Some of the reviews seem a bit iffy, but I'm interested.
I'm watching it now. It's not bad, but I would at least once like to see astronauts behave like the professionals they theoretically are...
I will begin this in the next week or so. It looks good. But what I really want is an adaptation of The Calculating Stars.
This is a little ridiculous: the main character is the Commander of the first mission to Mars and is responsible of this crew and the success of this historical event but, while they facing immense difficulties, she is literally obsessed with Spoiler her daughter's new boyfriend, who by the way, as her husband confirm to her, he's really a good guy I know that you need drama in your stories, but a voyage to Mars isn't dramatic enough???
I watched it over the last few days. There’s too many family drama tropes sprinkled in. Teen lies, teen does stupid shit, doting parents, etc... rinse, repeat. You can fast forward though half the earth side stuff and not miss a beat. Over all not too bad. The space stuff was fairly well done. Acting was good for the most part. I’d say, 7.5/10
As a person who thinks "another life" series should be the reason to invent time travel and go back and erase the most shitty series ever... This has some of its stuff.. Crew being it.. Ugh.. The chemistry of the crew us like oil and hydrochloric acid.. You'd think that NASA would have nipped this in the bud after a few weeks of training. But 1 episode in.. Well see..
They really aren't astronauts, any more than the various Trek characters are. They simply use space for a backdrop.
I stopped watching after the third episode, which was just dreadful. The way they framed things was like they'd told the love story of the century instead of possibly the most basic tale of 'I love you, but our love would not be accepted'. The mix of space adventure with soapy elements could have worked, but I'm not sure the balance was right. It's hard to pull that sort of thing off with extremely professional adults instead of teenagers. I had a hard time believing these highly trained astronauts would have become so unprofessional within about 2 hours of leaving the moon. Overall,felt like too much minor story, not enough main story.
What struck me is that they depicted China government in a not very favorable way. Lately Hollywood was terrified of offending China in any way so as not to lose their market.