National Post (National Edition)
Get on with it
Actually going to Mars elusive in The First
The First, Hulu’s slow-going and disappointingly dreary astronaut drama, stars Sean Penn as Tom Hagerty, the troubled but determined commander of the first manned mission to Mars. We’re in the early 2030s, and the trip is a public/private collaboration between NASA and a particularly driven yet personally frosty tech titan named Laz Ingram (Natascha Mcelhone).
The First opens with the worst, as a happy crew of astronauts boards the Providence at a Louisiana launch pad and blasts off for their historic voyage, intending to rendezvous with an orbiter that will take them on a seven-month trip to Mars. A minute after takeoff, the Providence explodes — reminiscent in every way of the 1986 Challenger disaster, down to the plumes of smoke from wayward boosters and the horrified family members watching from the bleacher stands below.
Back to the drawing board. While a budget-conscious congresswoman uses the disaster as an opportunity to propose scrubbing the costly Mars program, Ingram has just under two years to prepare her backup crew for the next mathematically available launch window.
She turns to Hagerty to helm the next trip. He was supposed to be on the doomed mission, but had to bow out after his wife (Melissa George) committed suicide and his collegeage daughter, Denise (Anna Jacoby-heron), went into rehab with a serious drug addiction — the miseries of which we see in redundant flashback loops over several episodes. Hagerty’s Earthbound problems were just too much to ignore, but now he has a second chance.
A viewer will soon get the idea that this is a show about going to Mars with little to no Mars actually in it. Created by Beau Willimon (House of Cards), with initial episodes gorgeously and forlornly directed by Agnieszka Holland (In Darkness), The First is very much an interior drama about people problems and flawed relationships, with a few engineering issues thrown in to remind us of the ultimate prize.
So, what you’re saying is, the rocket takes off in the third episode, right?
No.
OK, but surely by the fourth or fifth episode we’re totally on our way to Mars, right? Already landed, perhaps? There are only eight episodes, after all.
If your response to The First is to keep shouting “Get on with it, already!," then this may not be the missionto-mars story for you. The series is low on excitement, because it is obsessed with the feelings of leaving home and loved ones behind in such a profound way. Only near the very end does The First strap in for another go, after viewers have endured far too much narrative flourish. It’s easy to see what Willimon is going for — to give shape and heart to what is essentially a story of science and bureaucracy. It’s also easy to see the mistake in the formula: Empathy does not equal velocity.