Take out politics and the story is nothing special. These guys are astronauts, their mission just took longer than expected because people considered it was safer that way. A movie about it would as boring as a movie about people working in space can be.
But political figures and the media took the story as an opportunity to do what they do best in creating "engagement", i.e. flame wars.
Unsurprising that it did after the story itself devolved into a partisan flame war though, emotions are running high when the same sort of misinformation and lies are finding their way into previously sacrosanct topics like space exploration.
