In The Shadow of The Moon (U.)
Directed by David Sington.
Featuring Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Alan Bean, Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan. 100 mins.
It’s the year’s most thrilling, moving, overwhelming cinema experience and most of it was filmed the best part of four decades ago. A documentary about the Apollo moon landings made up almost entirely of NASA footage of the missions and told by the astronauts themselves is an obviously good idea but the film still surpasses expectation.
Most of our collective memory of the moon landings is that grainy images of almost translucent astronauts bouncing around on the moon and the stock footage of the launches. We’d assumed that that was all they had but it transpires that NASA have been sitting on some quite extraordinary footage all these years.
There are views from the launch, out of the capsule window, on the moon. Almost every shot is a wonder. The one that immediately sticks in my mind is one from inside a stage of the Saturn rocket as it disconnects from the main body of the vessel and falls back to earth as the rockets on the next stage fire into life. As you watch you wonder how on earth was that filmed. (The answer is unbelievable – the camera was ejected and caught in a net by an aircraft.)
Or perhaps the most remarkable footage is that of Mr and Mrs Armstrong on a 1962 edition of the American equivalent of What’s My Line on the day their son was accepted on the astronaut programme. Neil, of course, is now a recluse and doesn’t appear and, to be honest, the prospect of having the astronauts telling their own story wasn’t that enticing. Their reputation is as crew cut military dullards but in the flesh they are a delight, brimmed up with gratitude and enthusiasm for the great things they have seen and done. You’d imagine they were sick of talking about it but they gab on like they’ve been waiting years for someone to ask them.
In Armstrong’s absence Buzz Aldrin has become something of the official spokesman for the Apollo mission and can often seem like a bit of a stuffed shirt. Here though he’s schoolboy eager, leaning forward in his enthusiasm to communicate his experiences to the audience, like an aging former matinee idol who’s just been cast as the lead in The Patrick Moore Story.
It’s a joyous experience but poignant. Though very different films, it has something of a When We Were Kings (the 1996 Ali/ Rumble in the Jungle documentary) quality to it, that sense of coming from a troubled past, yet one where it was still possible to believe that heroic individuals and great collective deeds might inspire us towards a better future.
Directed by David Sington.
Featuring Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Alan Bean, Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan. 100 mins.
It’s the year’s most thrilling, moving, overwhelming cinema experience and most of it was filmed the best part of four decades ago. A documentary about the Apollo moon landings made up almost entirely of NASA footage of the missions and told by the astronauts themselves is an obviously good idea but the film still surpasses expectation.
Most of our collective memory of the moon landings is that grainy images of almost translucent astronauts bouncing around on the moon and the stock footage of the launches. We’d assumed that that was all they had but it transpires that NASA have been sitting on some quite extraordinary footage all these years.
There are views from the launch, out of the capsule window, on the moon. Almost every shot is a wonder. The one that immediately sticks in my mind is one from inside a stage of the Saturn rocket as it disconnects from the main body of the vessel and falls back to earth as the rockets on the next stage fire into life. As you watch you wonder how on earth was that filmed. (The answer is unbelievable – the camera was ejected and caught in a net by an aircraft.)
Or perhaps the most remarkable footage is that of Mr and Mrs Armstrong on a 1962 edition of the American equivalent of What’s My Line on the day their son was accepted on the astronaut programme. Neil, of course, is now a recluse and doesn’t appear and, to be honest, the prospect of having the astronauts telling their own story wasn’t that enticing. Their reputation is as crew cut military dullards but in the flesh they are a delight, brimmed up with gratitude and enthusiasm for the great things they have seen and done. You’d imagine they were sick of talking about it but they gab on like they’ve been waiting years for someone to ask them.
In Armstrong’s absence Buzz Aldrin has become something of the official spokesman for the Apollo mission and can often seem like a bit of a stuffed shirt. Here though he’s schoolboy eager, leaning forward in his enthusiasm to communicate his experiences to the audience, like an aging former matinee idol who’s just been cast as the lead in The Patrick Moore Story.
It’s a joyous experience but poignant. Though very different films, it has something of a When We Were Kings (the 1996 Ali/ Rumble in the Jungle documentary) quality to it, that sense of coming from a troubled past, yet one where it was still possible to believe that heroic individuals and great collective deeds might inspire us towards a better future.
