Mark Reviews Movies: APOLLO 11

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 1, 2019

The first 20 minutes or so of Apollo 11 are genuinely, surprisingly moving, and that's only in part because of the story being told. This is, obviously, a documentary about the first moon landing—indeed, the entirety of that mission to launch human beings into space, get them to the moon, land them on that celestial body, and return them to Earth safely. It's one of the most inspirational tales in all of human history.

Whatever unfortunate and tense reasons there were behind the mission—the murder of a President and a Cold War—were mostly set aside for several summer days in 1969. All of humanity was united in the curiosity of exploration, the celebration of technology, and the excitement of a singular human achievement.

We go into editor/director Todd Douglas Miller's film with all of this in mind, because this story has been told so many times—by people who remember it, in textbooks, across the media landscape. Fifty years later, we've heard it told so many times, and we want to keep hearing it, because it's one of the rare historical events without any baggage.

People explored unknown lands before, but they brought disease or war with them. Technology has done great and terrible things. Landing on the moon and having a pair of people step upon and explore that extraterrestrial landscape, though, happened out of a sort of naïve ambition. It could be done in theory, so it might as well be done in reality. Why shouldn't humanity go to that gray rock that we've been staring at in the night sky as long as we've had eyes as a species to do so?

The power of Miller's documentary is that it feels very much in-the-moment. The experience is of being a fly on the walls of the mission command centers or of being a stowaway onboard the assorted craft that brought Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the orbit of the moon, before the first two left the third behind to land on the lunar surface. The film has been assembled from archival footage and photographs from NASA. It features only the narration of the people involved and some news reports, but all of that narration is in the present tense. We're watching it happen as it happens.

Now, we finally get to what makes those early portions of the film so affecting. We know the story. We have a general idea of what kind of images we'll be seeing. The first shots we see, though, are revelatory. Miller didn't simply put together film, video, and photographs that we've already seen countless times before this. Much of this footage is new, because it comes from archives that NASA hasn't released to the public until now.

It is, to put a completely fine point on it, astonishing. The first shots show the 363-foot rocket being carried along on a massive tank of a vehicle, with treads on the vehicle that must at least be the height of a semi-truck or maybe two. The notion of moving that towering rocket is something we previously might never have considered, but there's the answer.

There's an assortment of things that we may have not or only briefly considered within this documentary. One is what it would be like to watch the entire process of landing on the moon unfold in real time. One of the more amusing details reveals the heart rates of the astronauts on liftoff (Armstrong and Collins, respectively, went over or came close to 100 beats-per-minute, but Aldrin's was that of a man who went out for a quick jog). Another detail is a matter of perspective. We've seen the same footage of Armstrong's first steps from that same, grainy video footage, but here, we see what those steps looked like from Aldrin's perspective.

This isn't just new and unique footage. It's pristine, too. Much of it was originally shot on 65 mm film, and Miller and his team have restored it with such attention and care that it might as well have been shot yesterday. The footage is clean, bright, and clear (On an IMAX screen, which the filmmakers wisely kept in mind for the film's presentation, it's even more astounding, because the blemishes, aging, and digital enhancements would be even more obvious, but such obvious imperfections are so rare that this is all the mention they're worth).

One starts to wonder, too, whom NASA put behind those cameras, because this isn't merely generic stock footage. The preparation for the launch, as well as the launch itself, is captured from almost every conceivable perspective. People wait to watch from a distance, having slept in their cars or in campers or in tents, and line up in parking lots. A handheld camera moves backwards through the rows of computer towers and terminals inside the launch command at Kennedy Space Center, just so there's an understanding of how much computing and man power there is at work for one part of the mission. One camera follows the trio of astronauts for the entire ride in the elevator from the ground to the cockpit of the spacecraft. The launch itself is a marvel of cinematography and editing, showing the entire process from the ground and into space from multiple angles.

The rest of the mission unfolds with similar attention to detail. In addition to the ones on the crafts, the astronauts have a movie camera and a still camera onboard, capturing the Earth as gets farther and farther way. Meanwhile, simple diagrams explain the basic science and engineering of each step of the voyage, and the more momentous steps—the landing, Armstrong's steps, the lunar lander docking with the command module, the fiery descent to Earth—play out without any lapses in time.

Apart from these lengthier scenes, Miller streamlines the mission to its core components. Apollo 11, then, will serve as a more-than-fine introduction to the first moon landing for generations of classrooms. For those who already have grown up with the knowledge of this accomplishment, the documentary provides so much unseen, faultless footage and presents it with so much assuredness that history almost feels new again.

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