I live in a mid-sized town in central Nebraska, so seeing the latest documentary in a theater is not always practical. But this weekend I was going to be passing through Omaha on my way to visit my father in Iowa, and it looked like I could just make a matinee of the new Apollo 11 documentary at the Alamo Drafthouse being released for this summer’s 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
I’m so glad I got to see it. I expect to list Apollo 11, assembled out of recently uncovered archival film and sound, as one of my favorite films of this year.
Earlier documentaries have tried to tell the story of the entire Apollo program (1989’s For All Mankind) or simulated a visit to the moon (2005’s Magnificent Desolation), but Todd Miller’s film focuses in on just the journey of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. It starts withe the roll out of the massive Saturn V booster to the launch pad and ends when the three astronauts emerge from quarantine. The story is told almost entirely using archival film with just a limited number of brief simple line animations explaining a few complex concepts.
The real treat of this documentary is seeing footage we have not seen before in dozens of anniversary of the moon landing TV specials. Much of it is drawn from a previously forgotten cache of 65 mm footage that had been hidden is archives since 1969. Some of the most impressive of this is of the Saturn V being rolled out and of the launch itself. While these will look good on the small screen at home, it’s at its best on the theatrical (or if you are really lucky, the IMAX) screen.
There was also footage shot by a one-frame-per-second camera mounted in the LEM. While it certainly doesn’t show smooth motion, it gives the viewer a much better picture of the moonwalk than the more frequently seen grainy television pictures. Miller further makes effective use of still photos show on medium-format roll film shot with the ubiquitous Hasselblad cameras used by NASA at the time.
The film does not have a narration, per se, instead using an archive of period sound that includes audio from the astronauts, from mission control, and from the equipment required to make this incredible journey. Occasionally Miller will use newscaster commentary from Walter Cronkite as essentially a narration, but never anything that wasn’t from the period.
If you watch the credits carefully – and who among us doesn’t – you will see that composer Matt Morton performed his electronic score for the film using late 1960s instruments, including the 1968 Moog Synthesizer IIIc.
I’ve been enthralled with the space program my entire life. I would like to say that my first media memory was the moon landing, but unfortunately that would not be true. Instead, that first memory belongs to the fire in Apollo 1 that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. But it is the Apollo 11 landing that has held my imagination every time I look at the moon. I had just finished third grade when my parents let me stay up late to watch the moon walk.
Over the years I’ve consumed almost everything I could find on the moon landing. Until now, the one thing that has held my attention over the years was Michael Collins memoir Carrying The Fire. Collins, of course, was the pilot of the command module who was the Apollo 11 astronaut who did not have to land on the moon. I just re-read Carrying The Fire this winter, and it is a worthy accompaniment to the Apollo 11 documentary. One of the things that makes Collins’ book so good is that he actually wrote it himself without the aid of a ghost. Because of that, it is the authentic voice of one of those voyagers to the moon.
Miller’s Apollo 11 film feels fresh because it doesn’t view the trip to the moon through the eyes of history and all that has happened over the last 50 years. Instead it keeps its gaze on what Americans saw and did back in the summer of 1969. The film has been criticizes for spending too much time looking at this amazing journey by focusing on men in short-sleeved dress shirts staring at flickering video screens. For some, that is not the most engaging image. But for me, the sound of each of the stations of Mission Control calling out “Go!” in response to the questioning of the flight controller is at least as exciting as any extended fight scene from the latest super hero epic.
If you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend getting out this week to see Apollo 11 in the best theater you can find. Thank you, Alamo, for bringing this excellent documentary to Nebraska.