Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/22/07
I tend to think of myself
as having been born at the best possible time: since my birth in
1972, we've witnessed explosions of tolerance, individual liberty, and
awesome technology and I managed to get through high school before they
got all draconian and shooting-filled. There's not a whole lot of
stuff I missed that I'd have really liked to have been around for, but
the Moon Landing is on the short list. It's hard to imagine in our
modern, partisan country: everyone rallying behind a National goal
that seems crazy and unreachable, but by getting the best and the brightest
together, we'd all be able to sit back and watch on TV as something out
of science fiction actually unfolded. But such was the case in 1969,
and the new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon gets together
almost all of the tiny fraternity of men who've actually been to another
world to let us know how it happened and what it was like. The film
is short on detail and fails to wrap their eyewitness testimony in a particularly
compelling cinematic package, but these guys were to the friggin' moon,
so I really didn't mind just sitting back and listening to anything they
cared to share about it.
Anyone reading this review
is likely familiar with the details, but here goes: in 1961 President
John F. Kennedy decided that since the Russians had beaten the United States
by getting both the first satellite and the first man into space, we needed
to set our sights on beating them to the Moon. The Apollo program
was created, and the best and brightest of the Nation's test pilots signed
up for the chance to go. After the disastrous deaths of three astronauts
in Apollo 1, the program began to get its' footing. Mission after
mission, the groundwork was laid for first orbiting the Moon (Apollo 8)
and then landing on it (Apollo 11). The Apollo 13 mission failed
to land, but by bringing the crew home safely under extraordinary circumstances,
it's now regarded as a great success. Four more visits to the Moon
followed before Apollo 17 made the final human trip there 10 months after
my birth.
To this familiar story, In
the Shadow of the Moon adds personalities. While Neil Armstrong
did not participate, his fellow Apollo 11 crewmembers Mike Collins and
Buzz Aldrin are delightful, with Collins still astonished by every last
thing they did and Aldrin emerging as a stone cold geek obsessed with calculating
orbital rendezvous. Other standouts include Alan Bean, fixated both
then and now on everything that could have gone wrong; Jim Lovell, the
famous commander of Apollo 13 who knows how to tell a story, and John Young,
the relentlessly cool customer whose pulse rate never climbed above 77
while Apollo 16 lifted off. The astronauts share their impressions
of the journey, the view, and the surface of the moon, all pretty damn
cool stuff. And before one has too much time to wonder why no famous
lines about the landing are attributed to then-President Richard Nixon,
Collins reads the speech that was prepared for Nixon in the event that
Apollo 11 couldn't make its' return flight to Earth, hinging on a turn
of phrase about them having come in peace, only to rest in peace.
Ugh.
First-time feature documentarian
David Sington puts together these interviews along with some familiar archival
footage and some not-so-familiar NASA clips of the moon itself (which looks
a lot dustier than we usually see it) in a standard, TV doc format that's
surprisingly uncinematic and narratively weak by current standards.
Those new or resistant to the subject matter are likely to be bored senseless,
but if there's a space geek in you at all, the stories are too good to
worry about the packaging. Still, holes in the story nag, particularly
when no one addresses their stories or feelings about the end of the program.
It's hard to imagine that within 30 years, there won't be any living humans
who've been to the moon.
The film has the interesting
effect of producing nostalgia for a time before I was born, but it's also
kinda discouraging how hard it is to imagine similar successes in our current
era of Lobbyists and Crossfire. I certainly don't want to
have lived in the 60's (the primary reason you're unlikely to see a review
of Across the Universe on this site anytime soon), but those people
sure knew how to put a man on the Moon. |
