I hope that America stops and remembers the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in an appropriate way. It’ll be unfortunate if most people’s experience of it is a couple minutes of light banter on “The View” or “The Today Show” and then on to the next fad diet.
One thing you really should do before this is all over is see the amazing documetary film “Apollo 11”, and on the biggest screen you can:
Why do we still have cinemas in a world where movies are released on demand the same date as in theaters and enormous flatscreen TVs have become the norm?
Answer: Apollo 11.
This extraordinary film, directed and edited by Todd Douglas Miller, isn't so much about the moon landing in 1969 as it is a film of that historic event. There is no voiceover narration, there are no present-day reflections from those who were there, and any facts about the mission itself are limited to what was broadcast or reported at the time. The effect is nothing short of thrilling.
The run of “Apollo 11” in theaters is coming to an end (though it is still out there for now). It didn’t run in very many theaters, and it grossed only $8.5 million. Compare that to the current No. 1 film, “Avengers: Endgame”, which is on its way to taking in $1 billion. Yes, that’s a “b”. “Apollo 11” is already available On Demand and gets released on Blu-Ray on May 14. It will be shown on CNN June 23 at 9 and 11 P.M. By all means, still watch it any way you can.
I saw it two months ago on IMAX, the week it came out, but the images and feelings still seem very fresh. It’s not as much about the facts as it is about what the whole thing felt like. It’s about the human details each step of the way.
Any information that you happen to absorb while viewing "Apollo 11" is secondary to the visceral experience of looking at it and listening to it. It's the kind of movie that you feel in your marrow, and that you might have a body memory of when you think back on it later, like when you're lying in bed at night after a long day at the beach, smelling the salt water in your nostrils and feeling the waves rising and falling in your legs and back.
We begin with the Crawler-Transporter, and we walk along with this immense vehicle as it very slowly wheels the Saturn V rocket (still the largest rocket ever built) out to the platform. A guy half the size of its tank wheels plods along with us.
Nobody says anything.
Walter Cronkite’s July 15 broadcast intro is played over it for a minute. He tries to put into words what a big deal this all is, but we know.
Other official-looking people try to be businesslike and follow their protocols. But they can’t escape the fact that the cargo atop this huge platform represents nothing less than the hopes and dreams of mankind. If I were any of those people, I thought, I’d be praying I did everything right, and that I will over the next several days. I can’t be tired. I can’t be inattentive. I know we’ve launched rockets before, but this one is taking people to the Moon tomorrow. This isn’t a rehearsal. This is it.
Night falls, and we have several hours to contemplate what is about to happen. The Saturn V stands brightly illuminated in the quiet:
It’s meditative. The footage of this lasts maybe for half a minute, but in 1969 you could easily have stared at it all night and not even moved. In these images you can see human beings reaching new worlds, but you can also see the first human being to make fire.
Not a bit of that is lost on you in the morning. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins (who we’ve just seen biographical montages of, to present them and their families as human beings) are helped into their suits. When you’re in a play and you start to put your costume on, the irreversibility of what you’re undertaking hits you, and you know you can’t turn back. The film turns absolutely surreal for a very long stretch here, until well after the launch.
Director Todd Douglas Miller:
“Two days earlier, they did a dry run and you see them joking around and being jovial,” he says. “When you see them on the lift-off day, you can now clearly see their faces, how the weight of the world is on them about what they’re about to do. It was so striking. It’s chilling.”
NASA historian Bill Barry:
I was really moved by the footage of Neil and Buzz and Mike getting suited up in the crew quarters. I’ve been in that room, and to see footage was just eye-watering to me. It was pretty amazing.
Despite the monumentality of the mission and its target, they’re still people following the little rules of Earth, like you and me, and as such, they still have to ride an ordinary van to the launch site, and we follow them all the way there.
We ride the elevator with the astronauts to the “white room”, where they make final preparations to enter the spacecraft, and ultimately we watch a few technicians close and seal the hatch. All the while, we have the countdown clock at the bottom of the screen, and the smaller that number gets, the sweatier our palms get, and the faster our hearts beat. God, they’re really doing this today, in 30 minutes.
Before we see the launch, we appropriately pause for a while to span the breadth of the crowds watching. There is stationary footage of grandstands, helicopter footage of fields, automobile footage scanning parking lots (one was J. C. Penney’s, I recall), all full of eager onlookers in the colors and styles of the 1960s. This immersive part of the film is fascinating enough on its own to be worth watching.
A description of what it was like for those people:
As soon as you got to the viewing area [the night before], you know something amazing is going on. The viewing area was 6 miles from the launch pad. The night before a launch, the Saturn V and the pad are awash in brilliant light.
People would spend the night in some combination of partying, walking around and talking to people, and grabbing some sleep in their cars, or in sleeping bags. I can’t remember the numbers of the size of the crowds, but I’m quite sure it was in the 10s of thousands. I’ve never seen so many Porta-Potties in one place.
It’s hard to describe the effect of seeing a Saturn V launch from that close. The power of the event is overwhelming. Even though I’d seen so many launches from Orlando, being that close can’t help but leave you awestruck. Seeing it on TV pales by comparison. I remember watching the rocket lift off slowly and climb into the sky, and didn’t even notice that it was dead silent. About 15 seconds after launch I remember looking out over the body of water that separated the viewing area from the launch pad, and seeing the freaking shock wave on the water, racing for us! Suddenly it wasn’t silent any more — an enormous roar slammed into us, and I could feel it in my chest. If this is what it sounded like from 6 miles away, I suddenly understood why they said it could kill you just from the sound if you were too close.
The thunderousness of the launch is certainly captured, but as you watch the rocket go up (and we stay trained on it for quite some time from Earth), the surreal feeling doesn’t stop, because you’ve spent a long time with the three guys who are in that rocket, the guys who are trying to go to the Moon right now, but who might never come back. Was it smart of them to do this? Are they regretting it at all? What must their families be feeling? But jeez, what if they actually make it??
After a while things finally calm down, and it’ll be a couple of days before they enter the gravitational influence of the Moon. I was almost relieved to be a bit bored by that notion. So I started looking around at details, like the Merv Griffin show on an engineer’s screen.
There were just rows and rows and rows of engineers in white shirts, each sitting at a computer that probably has less power than your thermostat does now. The cameraman tries to visit all of them, to show you the vastness and to document that they were there.
There’s still no narration, but before each maneuver of the craft, we’re given a little cartoon of how it’s supposed to go, and there are often distance and speed numbers at the bottom of the screen as we see the maneuver unfold for real, most often from cameras aboard the craft.
What I like about the whole moon landing segment is that everything is allowed to simply happen as it happens. No special attention is paid to Armstrong’s famous quote. He just says it, as one of many events in the sequence. Plus we see him do it from Aldrin’s vantage point, not the usual shot everyone’s familiar with.
[T]he footage of Armstrong bobbing on the surface of the moon (some of it never seen before) is still haunting. “There’s a reason,” the director says, “that Aldrin and Armstrong are honorary members of the American Society of Cinematographers.”
Of all the maneuvers shown in this film (and there are a lot), the most mind-blowing one, I think, is the redocking of the lunar module with Collins’ command module once they’re ready to go back to Earth. The film does a much better job, but I plopped a NASA video below. I didn’t realize how hard this was, sort of the equivalent of blasting off in a little machine from St. Louis, going a few miles up, and docking with a little vehicle already zooming past, in orbit somewhere over, say, North Carolina — or else you don’t get to come back to Earth ever again.
Collins is out there, out there, out there, and then this little dot appears, and it gets closer and closer until it’s clear that hey! that’s the lunar module!, and it’s actually going to meet up with us. We dock, collect the astronauts and their samples, jettison the lunar module, and then have to fire one last engine, and we do so behind the Moon so we can’t tell poor Houston that it worked, not for a few minutes.
We spend time in the command module as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere (talk about a tough ride — is that the ocean through all those flames?), and we also get to be aboard the rescue ship right up to splashdown and recovery. We even have to deal with quarantine.
My only criticism of the footage of this film: I wish we got to spend a little more time at the end at the tickertape parade. Those guys deserved it, and sheesh, so did we.
It’s not hard to find footage of the launch or the lunar lander touchdown or lots of other aspects of the mission. Haven’t we seen all of this stuff before?
You can’t be blamed for thinking any of this going into Apollo 11, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller’s chronicle of the landmark event. By the time you leave the theater 93 minutes later, however, you will wonder how we were ever able to properly consider this historical occasion without his doc. [...] This doesn’t just feel like a movie. It gives you the sensation that you’ve been transported right into the middle of history.
It’s a different place altogether, one we’re just not at right now:
For Miller, Apollo 11 also has a higher purpose beyond blowing moviegoers’ minds. “It shows that people can accomplish something great together,” Miller says. “We got to spread our wings and go out there. That’s what I hope people will take away, that we can do something like this again if we have the will. Do we? That’s the question.”