The First Wave

This is a under-appreciated and well acted story about the personal decisions the first Mars mission crew of 5 diverse individuals has to make before committing to a 2.5 year voyage to Mars and back. I would have loved to see a second season.

Nat Geo continues to dominate the doc game with a difficult, highly emotional, and even uplifting, view of the first four months of the pandemic in NYC. I appreciated the approach, following both specific doctors and patients, allowing the audience to experience a taste of the emotional toll the ups and downs faced while battling this totally unknown virus took on all involved. I assumed this wouldn't be an easy watch but found myself tearing up multiple times, for a number of different reasons both negative and positive, and would find it hard to come out of watching this unaffected.

Seriously spot on, from an ICU nurse perspective. I felt everything that they said, did, and felt!!! 2020 was crazy year, that nobody will forget. It was great how they tired everything together from covid to George Floyd. Then leaving off to the second covid spike.

Be careful which politician you use as the through line of your documentary! Hearing Andrew Cuomo was unfortunate, but it is more important to see and acknowledge the first doctors and nurses to battle Covid-19. It's no wonder nurses are quitting at record rates! The doc follows several patients and front-line hospital workers as they cope mentally and physically with the first stages of the pandemic. It's harrowing and sometime impossible to watch, but if you're curious why so many people are scared nearly two years later, this is a fantastic film to illustrate that! Final Score: 7.7/10

Director managed to bring touching stories and show the fast pace of the routine of essential service workers. Great documentary.

This didn't look natural at all. No disrespect to the efforts of the frontline workers, but if I knew nothing about this pandemic, I'd not take this as documentary. This looked scripted and many of the depicted events were quite clearly captured with professional video equipment. Who goes with full camera setup in a hospital overrun by sick people to shoot scenes whose value wouldn't have been known at the time? And those hospital scenes with 10 doctors and nurses attending to a single patient with half of them virtually doing nothing but just standing there. Really? How realistic is this to happen in a hospital overwhelmed by pandemic? Sorry, but this looks like a piece of propaganda, to reignite fear and anxiety, coming out at opportune moment when people started to move on...

Thank you, front line workers. Thank you. I am so sorry that half of this nation is so ignorant. It's a disgrace and disrespectful to your sacrifice. Incredible documentary.

The First Wave will fill your heart with deep love, gratitude, profound appreciation and a new found knowledge of what really happened in NY during the first wave of the Covid 19 Pandemic. I was deeply moved by this film in ways I truly didn't expect. I now have a first hand knowledge of what it was like for the doctors, nurses and intensive care teams that faced the Covid Beast unaware and unprepared but I also now know what is HUMANLY possible and it left me with a true sense of HOPE. People are wonderful . . . the love of family, friends, children and of course strangers coming together is really what the world needs now and what life is really all about. Thank you Matthew Heineman for this film it has the power to educate, change minds, fill hearts and connect us all in ways we never knew possible. I loved this film.

Emotional, powerful, inspiring. Covid fatique may discourage you from seeing/streaming this. It shouldn't. It is a must see for its artistry and, ultimately, for its powerful account of frontline health care workers, patients and families coming together with fortitude, courage, resilience and love in the midst of an apocalypse. It masterfully documents the complex and nuanced truth of a terrible time.

If you were a Health care worker in the first wave, this is a must see.. Validates what we felt and saw.. Please get vaccinated! We don't need to keep doing this!!