I’ve watched a fair few documentaries of late and with the moon landings in the news a lot with the 50th anniversary, here was an opportunity to mix the two. I’m gonna cut to the chase, this is brilliant! With all archival footage, it was technically made in 1969. That said it’s been lovingly cut together and is perfect for the cinema. It’s big! I don’t know what it was shot on, but it’s beautiful too. This of course was a massive event, arguably still the biggest in space exploration history and as such, there were cameras everywhere. Backrooms at NASA, Floridians rubbernecking from cars, journalists at rows of payphones, not to mention in the spacecraft and on the moon! It feels very much all access in real time, despite in reality being neither. It oozes cool, so many iconic shots, plus a ton of new ones I’d never seen, the scale is just staggering. The shots themselves mostly contain atmos sound, but combine that with audio from live comm feeds from the guest viewing PA, mission control, plus the astronauts themselves and you have the perfect narration. The ignition sequence alone will have your jaw cemented to the floor. There’s lots of fun techy graphic overlays too, showing how the various stages work and how the trajectory is planned, even a nice speedometer that clocks them at over 25000mph! The details are well documented so I won’t bang on, but to see the whole thing over 9 days put together like this is quite fantastic!
9/10
