Adams) - staying competitive with one another even in the final hours before what seems to be the program’s first manned mission. We begin with the two Mercury 7 alpha males - swaggering Naval aviator Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman) and morally upright celebrity Marine pilot John Glenn (Patrick J. The first sign of an absence of conviction comes just minutes into the premiere. But it lacks the courage or charisma of the men (and, at times, women) whose stories it’s telling.
If you don’t know the 1983 movie (more than worth the rental fee on the service of your choice), or haven’t seen From the Earth to the Moon or Apollo 13, or a half-dozen other great scripted or unscripted accounts of the space race, then it’s… fine? It has some solid, if unremarkable, performances, and occasional moments that capture those heady, dangerous days when seven men competed to be the first to strap himself on top of a giant bomb and hopefully survive the trip. After translating a handful of Wolfe’s scenes for the first episode, the show is content to be a dutiful, mostly competent, infrequently lively historical workplace drama. No, this Right Stuff is not trying to push the outer edge of the envelope, or make it to the top of the pyramid. And it doesn’t care at all about Chuck Yeager, who was the breakout character of previous versions (Sam Shepard was the film’s lone acting Oscar nominee) and is not so much as mentioned, let alone seen, in the series. Nor is it particularly interested in interrogating different brands of heroism. The Right Stuff TV show, developed by Mark Lafferty, is definitely not a masterpiece of its form. In the original article, written in the voice of a Mercury astronaut lecturing Wolfe on the mysteries of their profession, “the right stuff” is an unspoken competition among test pilots: “It’s like a huge and very complex pyramid, miles high, and the idea is to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you are one of the elected and anointed ones who have the right stuff and can move ever higher and even - ultimately, God willing, one day - that you might be able to join that very special few at the very top, that elite who truly have the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of The Right Stuff itself.” While researching the piece, Wolfe fell in love with the stories of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, and instead churned out a four-part series of articles titled “Post-Orbital Remorse,” which he then adapted into the 1979 book The Right Stuff, which in turn was adapted by Philip Kaufman into a 1983 movie, and this weekend becomes - kind of, sort of - a new streaming series for the National Geographic hub of Disney+. In 1972, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner sent New Journalism titan Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon.
0 kommentar(er)
