Watching a giant leap for mankind
Apollo 11 Really there’s only one film we should be watching this week and that’s this one, the story of the Apollo 11 mission which landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon exactly 50 years ago this Saturday.
For those of us too young to remember it actually happening (and that’s presumably the vast majority of the population), we just take it as fact that man landed on the moon in 1969 – and that no one has been terribly interested in going back there since.
The huge merit of Todd Douglas Miller’s new film is that it goes a long way towards recreating the sense of the excitement and adventure that everyone involved – or simply watching – must have felt at the time. However, it’s a film with plenty of shortcomings, largely because it is so narrowly determined to focus on the mission itself to the exclusion of all else. There is merit in that, but maybe there was scope too for just a little bit of context, just a little bit more explanation. And also with almost all the film comprising tinny, muffled voices murmuring to each other across vast distances, there was also a case for subtitles.
Beyond a quick news flash about Chappaquiddick and mention of the ongoing Vietnam war, we get no great sense of why this was happening when it did; no idea who the astronauts really were; and no idea of just how on earth these banks of white-shirted blokes sitting in front of ancient-looking computers could possibly have done what they did. Or indeed how on earth they could possibly have known just what they were going into. Maybe the truth is that they didn’t. But with his newly discovered trove of 70mm footage, and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, Miller puts the focus firmly on the mission itself for a truly fascinating look at a journey which transfixed the world.
isn’t a film which is terribly interested in answering questions; it throws up hundreds along the way. But it is certainly a film which captures what surely must have been a flavour of the endeavour. And if it leaves you wanting more, then its achievement will have been to spark curiosity about a genuine landmark moment in our collective history.