Does ‘The Right Stuff’ On Disney+ Have the Right Stuff?

The “why” behind doing a remake isn’t always a complicated question; mostly, given the realities of the film and television industry, the answer is usually “because $$$.” But when you’re talking about a remake of a classic—and Philip Kaufman’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1983 film version of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff most definitely is one—it feels like you need to make a stronger case for what you hope to accomplish. And maybe, if you’re taking what was previously a 3-hour movie and making it a 7-hour limited series, as Disney+ is now doing with The Right Stuff, that stronger case is the opportunity to dig deeper into the characters and stories.

In some ways, that is what Disney+’s The Right Stuff offers, based on the evidence of the first five episodes available for preview. The story of the Mercury 7 astronauts launches with a prologue set on May 5, 1961— the day Alan Shepard became the first American in space— before flashing back to 1959 and the first call for pilots to join the newly-created American space program. There we get to know the three future astronauts who will become the focus of the narrative: the cocky Shepard (Jake McDorman); John Glenn (Patrick J. Adams), who obsesses about the possibility of making history; and Gordo Cooper (Colin O’Donoghue), trying to patch together his troubled marriage with his wife, Trudy (Eloise Mumford), in order to project the necessary squeaky-clean family man image.

Unlike the 1983 film, this incarnation of The Right Stuff— at least in these early episodes— is decidedly earthbound, with no Chuck Yeager and little in-flight footage. It feels, not surprisingly, more like a TV series and less like the epic film. More specifically, it feels like a serialized TV drama, digging into the troubles of its characters, like Carpenter’s strained relationship with his military dad, and the Coopers’ strained efforts to mend their relationship. The series also expands the scope of the storytelling beyond the astronauts themselves, spending time on mission control chief Chris Kraft (Eric Ladin) and his attempts to whip the ground crew into shape, as well as Trudy Cooper’s own background as a pilot.

The problem with that approach is that while it might pull you along on a moment to moment basis within each episode, as problems are raised and resolved, it misses some of the big-picture thematic ideas that made the film so fascinating. Yes, this version of The Right Stuff acknowledges that most of the press coverage of the Mercury 7 was hero-worship, glossing over the flaws and foibles—like marital infidelities—that would have tarnished the program’s reputation with the public. But it also engages in some of that same glossing-over, so concerned with making its characters sympathetic and likable that it ignores how “great men” can sometimes be great big jerks. Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff was a complex exploration of the intersection between patriotism and reality; Disney+’s The Right Stuff is a perfectly solid piece of nighttime soap opera.

The cast members do a nice job with the character dynamics they’re exploring— particularly Patrick J. Adams balancing Glenn’s mix of ambition, media-savvy and Boy Scout earnestness— though it’s hard to stack up to the earlier incarnations played by Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward and Scott Glenn. There are also fresh nuances here that the film never addressed, from Glenn trying to work the politics of the 1960 presidential election, to the unique method by which the first flight order was chosen. On a surface level, this is the same kind of behind-the-scenes history that made 1983’s The Right Stuff so compelling as it chipped away at the marble statues its protagonists had been turned into.

But ultimately, this version feels a bit too reverential to allow those protagonists to look bad. The inveterate womanizer version of Gordon Cooper played by Dennis Quaid is turned here into a guy who says “I didn’t get you back so I could go into space; it was the other way around.” That’s exactly the kind of thing that would have been put into the polished and publicist-approved Life magazine articles that we see crafted in The Right Stuff. A tale that fundamentally works as a warts-and-all portrait feels a little thin when the creators want to turn all those warts into dimples.

The first episode of The Right Stuff will be available to stream on Disney+ starting October 9.

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