Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT For All Mankind gets roasted by astronaut Chris Hadfield as “cartoonish” and "excruciating to watch." The Apple TV+ sci-fi series premiered in 2019 and imagines an alternative history in which the Soviet Union landed on the Moon first instead of the United States, and the space race continued for the subsequent decades to come.
In a new video for Vanity Fair, Hadfield viewed a scene from For All Mankind and said, "There is so much wrong there that it's just excruciating to watch." Though the astronaut admits the idea of an alternative history is interesting, he thinks the show quickly became "cartoonish." Read his full commentary or watch the portion of the video below:
There is so much wrong there that it's just excruciating to watch. The idea of an alternative history where the Soviets with Alexei Leonov were the first to land on the Moon, I really think it's a clever possibility for plots, but it very soon, just a few episodes in, everything became sort of cartoonish.
It sounds like a bunch of actors sitting around a table pretending to be soldiers, "Take point and "sound off." How come nobody on the American team, not one, speaks a word of Russian. They knew there were gonna be Russians there. I used to be a combat fighter pilot with an armed F-18 intercepting Soviet bombers in the Cold War. These are ostensibly trained astronauts and Marines. That's not how anybody's gonna behave, especially when the stakes are that high.
How Accurate Is For All Mankind's Portrayal of Space Exploration? Though Hadfield roasts the show for its cartoonishness, he does say something in the scene he watched is accurate. On the Moon, a US astronaut shoots a Soviet astronaut, and since Hadfield did a lot of research for his book, The Apollo Murders, on how a gun would work on the Moon, he can confirm this scene is accurate.