Hanks draws on love of space to narrate immersive documentary
You won’t see Tom Hanks on one of those space tourism flights that whisk celebrities and millionaires on a suborbital jaunt for a few hours. He says it wouldn’t be enough time out of this world.
“I don’t need to go up and down,” Hanks said in a recent interview. “I think I’d need a little bit longer in paradise.”
Going to the moon is another matter — and the subject of “The Moonwalkers,” an immersive documentary co-written and narrated by Hanks.
“I’d do that in a second,” Hanks said. “I don’t have the math. I do not have those abilities, but I’m sure there’s something I could do in order to help the program.”
The Oscar-winning actor is a lifelong space buff, and he has channeled his passion into “The Moonwalkers,” which recently opened at the Lightroom, a London venue specializing in interactive art and film experiences.
Visitors sit on benches surrounded by imagery as the 50-minute film brings NASA’s Apollo space
missions to life. The focus is on the 12 men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, the thousands of people who helped them get there and a new generation of astronauts set to return to the moon as part of the Artemis program.
It’s a high-tech blend of archive film footage, drawings, animation and digitally remastered photographs — but not, Hanks stresses, any computer-generated images.
“Every photograph, every image was a photograph taken by a human of the subject,” Hanks said in the interview. “So there’s nothing fake.”
“The Moonwalkers,” which runs through April 21, is subtitled, “A journey with Tom Hanks.” The actor narrates in his warm, avuncular style and co-wrote the script with British documentary filmmaker Christopher Riley.
The space race is presented as a deeply
humanist endeavor that represents humanity’s unquenchable curiosity and desire to do things — as President John F. Kennedy said of the moonshot — “not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
Hanks, 67, has been enthralled by lunar exploration since he was a kid trying to simulate zero gravity by sitting at the bottom of a backyard swimming pool. His performance as Jim Lovell, commander of a space mission in jeopardy, in “Apollo 13” helped revive popular interest in the Apollo program in the 1990s.
Perhaps the signs were there early on that he’d become an actor, not an astronaut. What hooked Hanks on space was not so much the cutting-edge science as the human drama. His interest is in the people up there.
“The science is cool, when you can grasp what the science is, but the science always goes hand in hand with, you know — Do they drink coffee up there? Do they have hot water? Do they need a shave?”
Hanks said the first time he was entranced by space was as a 12-year-old in 1968, seeing an image on his TV of the Earth beamed live from the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbiting the moon.
“It was a live broadcast, and you could see the cloud, you could see the gray of the ocean, you could see the darker gray of the land,” he said, recalling his amazement that he was seeing “this great saga” on the same TV he used to watch “Batman” and John Wayne movies.
“I didn’t view it as politics. I didn’t view it as news. I viewed it as something that was like a great adventure out of ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ … a storytelling artistic achievement equal to all of the technological brilliance.”
“The Moonwalkers” includes interviews with four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — who are due to join the Artemis II mission, humanity’s first foray moonward in half a century.