Before watching these series, I had no idea how we accomplished the mission of landing humans on the Moon in 1969. After spending 12 hours watching this show, I still have no idea because there is no real explanation in the show. Out of the 12 aired episodes, only 2 are anywhere near interesting while the rest of the episodes are simply time-fillers with no substance but that's another topic.
This series tries (but fails) to tell the story of how we went to the moon in 1969 by giving too much detail but also not giving enough detail at the same time, failing on both fronts twice and it takes a special kind of skill to fail twice like this.
Here is how each episode literally goes: a bunch of engineers and scientists sit around a meeting table discussing how they need to tackle a specific problem. We are being told that going to the moon is actually easy if only they could solve this one problem which happens to be the focus on that individual episode. During the entire episode they have meeting after meeting, trying to tackle the problem with no solution. They talk about so much detail from specific mathematical formulas to specific materials they will be using and chemical compounds but no real solution is offered.
Then in the last 10 minutes of the episode they play a montage (with dramatic music) where a some engineer is putting formulae on a blackboard, jumping in joy because he solved this problem, everyone is cheering and celebrating and we are told that they finally figured out a way to make it a success but of course no mentions of what that solution actually is. We are just told "they solved this problem ok, have faith in us" and the episode ends with another success story.
So at first they give so much detail that does nothing but confuse and bore 99.99% of the viewers unless they are a space engineer or an astrophysics and at the end when it matters most they don't even tell how the issue was solved other than saying it was solved.
What's even the point of all this? It looks like producers couldn't decide whether to film a documentary or drama series and they ended up making a boring and pointless soap opera instead but still decided to air it anyways because it's HBO and people love anything HBO puts on TV no matter how bad it is.
At the end, you will have spent watching 12 hours hoping to learn more about how we went to the moon and at the end of the 12 hours all you'll have gained from this experience will be utter boredom and confusion without having learned anything new at all.
This series tries (but fails) to tell the story of how we went to the moon in 1969 by giving too much detail but also not giving enough detail at the same time, failing on both fronts twice and it takes a special kind of skill to fail twice like this.
Here is how each episode literally goes: a bunch of engineers and scientists sit around a meeting table discussing how they need to tackle a specific problem. We are being told that going to the moon is actually easy if only they could solve this one problem which happens to be the focus on that individual episode. During the entire episode they have meeting after meeting, trying to tackle the problem with no solution. They talk about so much detail from specific mathematical formulas to specific materials they will be using and chemical compounds but no real solution is offered.
Then in the last 10 minutes of the episode they play a montage (with dramatic music) where a some engineer is putting formulae on a blackboard, jumping in joy because he solved this problem, everyone is cheering and celebrating and we are told that they finally figured out a way to make it a success but of course no mentions of what that solution actually is. We are just told "they solved this problem ok, have faith in us" and the episode ends with another success story.
So at first they give so much detail that does nothing but confuse and bore 99.99% of the viewers unless they are a space engineer or an astrophysics and at the end when it matters most they don't even tell how the issue was solved other than saying it was solved.
What's even the point of all this? It looks like producers couldn't decide whether to film a documentary or drama series and they ended up making a boring and pointless soap opera instead but still decided to air it anyways because it's HBO and people love anything HBO puts on TV no matter how bad it is.
At the end, you will have spent watching 12 hours hoping to learn more about how we went to the moon and at the end of the 12 hours all you'll have gained from this experience will be utter boredom and confusion without having learned anything new at all.