Apollo 11

Saw the Apollo 11 IMAX film last night. Highly recommend. No narration just the NASA announcer, communications between ship and ground plus a few other bits added such as Walter and JFK now and then. Images are amazing, esp in IMAX. It moves well, no slow moments, no soap opera, no agenda, lots of unseen footage and some new stories, pure documentary, the trip is the whole story. PDI is great, TLI is great, LM separation, footage of the crowd is great. Go see, you wont be disappointed. 90 minutes long.

The film starts the morning of launch day July 16, 1969. There are no actors, no reenactments, no narrator. It is 100% restored archival footage and recorded audio, most of which I had never seen before. Opening footage of the crowds gathering around Kennedy Space Center gave you the sense it was apparent to everyone the magnitude of what was about to happen.

They had audio and video of (an issue I won't spoil, something during launch prep I had never heard of before). Obviously there is no external footage of the spacecraft from the time it leaves earth orbit until it arrived at the moon but the editing and coverage used are excellent and you never feel like you're in the dark or missing out.

There is no attempt made at politicizing the event or manipulating the viewer, it is raw, factual cinéma vérité. Although I did find Kennedy's speech moving, they made the excellent choice to NOT show the famous portion we've all heard about landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade. It was the rest of that speech, which I'm not sure I'd ever heard, that was astute, prophetic and even funny at one point.

My one very minor caution is that viewers who aren't already aware how critical/dangerous some maneuvers were could miss out on the gravity of the situation. The filmmakers do assist with this with the score, which is absolutely fantastic (and according to the credits, composed entirely with instruments available in July '69), and some minor on-screen graphics (e.g. FUEL 30 seconds, 1202 alarm). It's a trivial concern but viewers who are familiar with the space program in general, and this mission in particular, will get the most out of the experience.

The film wraps up after our astronauts are safely home and cleared from quarantine. During the credits there are a few more interesting shots of some of the celebrations.

This documentary was made using a lot of recently discovered film, much of it is high-definition, large format film. It truly gives amazing images.

But the story of course is the real meat here. I attended the same University as Armstrong, I had just graduated with my Master's when the Moon landing happened. I remember it well and will always have a connection, Armstrong and I walked the same college walkways, had classes in some of the same buildings, both watched the Boilermakers play football in the same stadium. Just a few years apart.

Recently I discovered separate online interviews with both Armstrong and Aldrin, in the documentary we see them as young men about to get the ride of a lifetime, then we see them nearer the end of their lives putting it all in perspective.

Great documentary, worth a viewing for anyone.

A half-century ago, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and into the history books. In the decades since, that moment and the flights of NASA's Apollo program have been chronicled in seemingly countless documentaries. At the top of that list remains 1989's For All Mankind from the late Al Reinert and 2007's In The Shadow Of The Moon from British filmmakers David Sington and Christopher Riley. Up there with them now is 2019's Apollo 11, an exciting new film from Todd Douglas Miller that is begging for you to see it on the biggest screen possible.

Why?

In part because of Miller who, like those other great filmmakers of Apollo before him, wasn't content to merely do a rehash of what had come before. Miller's Apollo 11 is in part a deep dive into the NASA archives, uncovering things that even the most seasoned space enthusiast has likely never seen before. There's a wealth of pre-launch footage, for example, tracing the preparations from the rollout of the massive Saturn V rocket to the launch pad to multiple perspectives of the launch itself. Even when events move into space, there's still a wealth of rare material to experience including conversations between the astronauts themselves as well as between them and Mission Control in Houston. Even where footage that has become synonymous with the mission and the era such as the stage separations of the rocket or the Lunar Module's descent to the surface of the Moon, it's presented with clarity and scale rarely seen elsewhere. For that alone, the film renders excellent service.

It does so in other ways, as well. Unlike those two documentaries I mentioned at the top of this review, Miller doesn't use astronaut interviews (either aural or visual) to help tell the story. Instead, Apollo 11 unfolds entirely through archival sources ranging from the transmissions to the voice of NASA's public affairs or well-known TV commentators like Walter Cronkite. To help aid visually for parts of the mission where there isn't much or anything to show, the film employees simple animation alongside such commentaries. The film also makes effective use of split-screen and captions to portray mission control or to show events such as the actual walk on the Moon from multiple perspectives. As much as the footage itself on a cinema screen does, it presents the sheer scale of the endeavor but without losing the viewer in the technicalities involved in spaceflight.

In some ways, that's the greatest triumph of Apollo 11 the documentary. It's a film keen to present Apollo 11 the mission in awe-inspiring yet understandable terms, one that emphasizes how incredible in scope and achievement that flight five decades ago this July was. It's also a reminder, at a time when cinema screens find themselves increasingly dominated by would-be blockbusters and superhero flicks, of the raw power of cinema to present stories. Both of those are things we need reminding of, it seems, and the film does a superb job of both.

I had the chance to see an advance screening of the movie in Vienna, during a meeting of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and the word that best sums it all up is "WOW". It is wonderful to be able to witness all the work that went into a momentous achievement. There is the great moment we all know, the "one step for a man, a giant leap for mankind" moment. But this movie pays a much-deserved tribute to all those men and women who joined efforts to make this possible. Fantastic.