Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Let's be realistic.

Dreadfully Boring

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Director Richard Dale managed to shoot only Whites. One Black astronaut slipped through in passing. 0ne woman technician, a blond knockout, made the cut. No Black technicians were shown, male or female. Ironically, the narrator spouts a line when the Apollo missions were beginning, that the time for calculations is over, ironic in the light of the recent Margot Lee Shetterly book and 20th Century Fox film, "Hidden Figures," which tells the story of the essential calculations accomplished for years by NASA's "Colored Girls," as they were known at the time. Dale even managed to exclude Blacks from the decades of fascinated onlookers at launches, landings, tragedies, and successes.

I guess the title says it all. Why do space documentaries have to be so bad? Of all the ones ever made, I can only think of a few that are anything but irritating. I was there, I remember. And the music! God who writes this stuff? This particular attempt fails on every level. It fails as history, it fails as nostalgia, it fails as entertainment. The filmmaking technique is amateurish - poor film to video transfer, poor editing, poor choice of material. But the main thing is that it is somehow viscerally irritating. Of the list of things that do not need any window dressing, the Space Race must be on top. So one wonders how, again and again and again, documentary filmmakers manage to get it so wrong. Don't waste time on this turkey - see "In the Shadow of the Moon" and its companion pieces about the engineering effort, "Moon Machines".-drl

I saw this documentary off Netflix the other day, and I hope this is the right one, since there were several options on IMDb for "Rocket Men". Just a coincidence that I watched this only a couple days before seeing the recent premiere of the mini-series, "The Astronaut Wives Club", which I referred to as "The Right Stuff: The Feminist Revisionist Version"- basically that same story from the perspectives of the women in the various different astronauts' wives in the Mercury and Apollo (and Gemini perhaps??) space programs. "Rocket Men" is also a good companion piece to TRS, basically showing a lot of the same events in documentary format of course. The film even goes into the Challenger and Columbia disasters a bit. I especially liked the narration by actor, Michael J. Reynolds. Like Levon Helm's narration in TRS, it provided a very down-to-earth homey feel to a literally out of this world subject. But I definitely enjoyed this- found it quite mesmerizing in fact. Again, I hope this is the right movie I'm reviewing-?? LOL

I'm not seeing any reviews blasting this film for conveniently forgetting the Apollo 13 mishap. I was watching the film and I had to rewind because I thought I blacked out and missed it. Nope, they just chose to not even mention it. They left out one of the biggest events in the exploration of space. I'm still trying to understand why any editor would think that the Apollo 13 mission would be something deserving of the cutting room floor. The only thing I can think is that the geniuses at the BBC think that Apollo 13 was some sort of embarrassment. I watched the first 2 parts of this film but then turned it off when I realized the filmmakers weren't too concerned with telling an accurate story.