General Mark Naird (yes, there will be jokes based on consonance with "nerd") receives a long-awaited promotion. But instead of taking over as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Mark is assigned to lead the newly formed sixth branch of the US military, the Space Force. And a certain irony lies in the fact that the creation of the series was announced when there were only rumors about the intention to create real Space Forces.
The series is made in the genre of a working comedy - Mark has to lead an unimaginable bedlam. The creators of the series, accidentally or intentionally, mixed together the Space Forces and NASA - Neird has to deal with military missions, and science, and even a manned landing on the moon. At the same time, at the military base, he feels at ease and impudently demands secret documentation "observer from a partner country in the ISS" Captain of the Russian Aerospace Forces Yuri Telatovich.
Considering that he is played by Russian Alexei Vorobyov, I really thought that the delusional spelling of the character's name was made on purpose, but this is still an authentic mistake of costume designers.
Some mistakes make you think that someone on the team cheated or disobeyed the consultant. But the series is humorous, perhaps this "Proton" with the American flag on the cookie box makes fun of the general illiteracy of society and manufacturers of goods with a near-space theme.
The fictional headquarters of the Space Forces in the series is located in the wilderness of Colorado, and there is also a launch complex at the base. In reality, American spaceports prefer to be located on the coast, so that, without asking anyone, they can drop the spent stages into neutral ocean waters.
Some absurdities are generally quite successful. The fictional rocket launching the Epsilon 6 satellite clearly stole the landing pads from the Falcon 9, and to no avail, because, judging by the engine nozzle, the side boosters are solid propellants and, like the Falcon 9, cannot land. But if we remove this tribute to fashion, then two solid-propellant boosters, as well as the second stage with two engines, are Titan III / IV, which launched both military satellites and, for example, Voyagers, having launched for the last time only fifteen years ago ...
Something could have been done better - as a factor for a possible postponement of a rocket launch, it would be worth mentioning not humidity, but wind, thunderstorm clouds, precipitation or atmospheric discharges. The story of the chimpanzee astronaut was a bit difficult to watch due to the amount of realism violations required for the plot. Well, the launching Soyuz as an Indian rocket should be replaced with an Indian GSLV, there are perfectly visible aerodynamic surfaces that could play the role of fictitious "steering wheels of the Pegasus system" that provoked an attack of spy mania in the sixth episode. By the way, the ending of the episode is not entirely obvious and I personally liked it.
In some scenes, the show is surprisingly psychologically good. Yes, of course, in reality, going beyond the limits of parameters permissible for launch would lead to a postponement of the launch of the rocket, but this story tells the audience about the risk and how they take it. The scene of helping daughter with trigonometry after hell watch teaches the importance of family. And, of course, one cannot fail to note the excellent scene of the budget hearings in the second episode, which, in my opinion, is one of the summits of the "Space Forces". Speech about the importance of people personally reminded me of the climax from "Boat". And here the benefits of astronautics are explained better than many films. And the way Naird's roof goes in the third episode is quite realistic and reminds of the importance of the isolation experiments that we all partially underwent in the spring.
The actors did their job very well. Personally, I liked John Malkovich the most in his role as the chief scientist of Space Forces, even if in some places he closely resembles his own recent role in The New Pope.
The series has a funny property - the more the viewer is in the subject - military, space and American politics, the funnier it will be for him. Sending rifles into orbit will be more amusing for those who know how absurd items , including advertisements, ended up there. An Oklahoma Senator who thinks the Earth is flat or a stream of tweets from the President will be understandable to those who know what Jim Inhof is known forand the Twitter style of Donald Trump. The ridicule of "fashion innovators" will appeal to those who are tired of the flow of "super technologies" ending in zilch. Even the bas-relief on the dining room wall is a joke on the famous "hoisting the flag over Iwo Jima" photograph.
If you look for reviews of the series in the media, you will find a surprisingly large number of sharply negative ones. But their common message is basically “you're laughing wrong at our political situation,” which has nothing to do with the artistic merit of the show. For me personally, "Space Force", quite unexpectedly, turned out to be one of the best movies "about space" in a few years.