On the front lines of history

FILM REVIEW the praise owed to the brave men on the front lines of Houston’s mission control in the 1960s and ’70s. (They were all men and mostly white, although take a step back and you’ll find a more diverse group — see Hidden Figures, about Katherine Johnson and her black, female comrades.)

Fairhead, a first-time director and an editor on such lunar documentaries as The Last Man on the Moon and In the Shadow of the Moon, has gathered an impressive number of former controllers — including the aptly named Bill Moon — to get their impressions on some of the milestones of the Apollo years: the tragic fire 50 years ago that took the lives of three astronauts on Apollo 1; the rush of the first manned landing; that crazy day that Apollo 12 was struck by lightning just after launch; and the “successful failure” that was Apollo 13. The film’s 100 minutes doesn’t leave time for much else. Fairhead takes us through a rather rushed recap of the dawn of the Space Age, and somewhat jarringly mixes modern computer-generated recreations of spacecraft with archival footage, much of it featuring British science journalist James Burke. (Fairhead hails from the U.K.)

The film is bookended with modern female controllers, reminding us how things have changed. “They went through the fire for us,” says Courtenay McMillan, a flight director since 2007. Mission Control makes for an efficient reminder of just that. ∂∂∂