When We Left Earth (2008)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Nice effects though.

Awesome Movie

After I first binge watched this on a free streaming platform, I went to Amazon to purchase it because I could not imagine ever not having access to rewatch whenever inwanted. Basically even though at the time I watched it, it was free I turned around and paid $ to have it forever. Stop reading this stupid review and watch it.

A wonderful series about the US space program. This is the documentary that needed to be made about the world's first entrance into the last frontier. Superbly done, this is one of my favorite documentary series ever produced. Everything, from story to music is close to perfect. Because they knew they were making history, the scientists, engineers, astronauts and others had enough foresight to record everything on film. I imagine hours and hours and hours of footage exists. Until now, this footage had not been crafted into the compelling story that was waiting to be told. Told chronologically, the story starts early in the space program, with rockets barely able to take off, and often exploding. As noted in the film, the task was to use these rockets with people on the top to get to the moon. It's a journey that will be remembered for thousands of years; humans' first travels in space.

Overall, I thought "When We Left Earth" was a fantastic, excellent and amazing mini-series that I would be delighted to own on Blu-Ray DVD, if it weren't for those Swedish buccaneers. Nevertheless, the inclusion of so much color-footage shot by the astronauts themselves was clever and made for breathtaking viewing, and that's the selling point that will probably get me to fork out for the gen. discs. It wasn't all peaches- and-cream, however, and I was genuinely disappointed with the cursory treatment given to Apollo 1, which only received approximately four minutes of very bland, formulaic coverage. There was no imagery from any of the three Apollo 1 crew-members' funerals or memorials or anything heroic, and I believe the producers dropped the ball and missed the chance to jerk a bit of genuine contrived emotion out of us. Their decision not to was difficult to accept and is the only sore point for me in an otherwise-excellent miniseries.If it was the case that there simply was no video footage available from the funeral and interment of Gus Grissom, for example, my apologies. But if ever there was an appropriate forum in which to display such coverage/footage, it would've been here.

Let me start out with the good stuff.This miniseries was good in that it captures, 30 to 50 years later, the thoughts and experiences of those who were there. The modern footage -- the interviews with the astronauts and flight controllers especially -- does what historical documentaries do best: captures the words and experience of those who were actually there. I especially liked the interviews with Gene Kranz, Jim Lovell, and -- of all people -- the nearly hermit-like Neil Armstrong.That said, the "HD" sequences are, by and large, limited by the resolution of the original (what a surprise), and calling them "HD" is a hyperbole at best, disingenuous at worst. So the Discovery channel's hype about digging stuff out of the vault and getting an HD-worthy presentation of this vintage footage is just that: hype. There are some priceless shots, like the slow-motion ground test footage of the explosively-jettisoned Mercury hatch. But, by and large, the "unearthed" footage is stuff we've seen before.What I detested most, though, was the U.S.-centric view of the writing. The script for the Skylab sequences would lead you to believe that the U.S. orbited the first space station. The Apollo 8 mission planning and execution was triggered by the placement of a Russian moon rocket on their launch pad, but this is overlooked.So, obviously, the "we" in "when we left earth", is Americans.A historical distortion, at best.