I was not expecting much from David Sington's documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. This is nothing against Signton, of whom I'd yet to hear, but more the subject matter: the moon landing. There's a very 'been there, done that' feel to space travel now, and to think that there was some new insight to be had seemed unlikely.
Fortunately, I was completely wrong.
The inspiration for the film, as described by Sington in a Q&A after the screening, informs the premise. Of the six and a half billion people on the planet, only nine have ever been to the moon, so it seemed like a good idea to him to, you know, talk to them. The result is the story of the Apollo missions as told by the astronauts who flew them.
The film does nothing more complicated than mixing old footage with new interviews, yet I was impressed by how potent (and beautiful) some of those old images still are. Yes, I did think of the early MTV spots when seeing the stages break away, but that only made me realize why MTV picked those images — tying themselves to a revolutionary idea for a generation that didn't have one.
And that is part of the goal of this movie; one of the younger audience members said she had no reference point for the events depicted in the film but once she saw them, she realized they had a power she never appreciated.
The film elucidates certain aspects of the "tired" story that I hadn't appreciated. There's the fact that while today - with a few tragic exceptions - space flight is considered to be routine, at the time rockets were about the most dangerous thing you could be around. A montage of spectacular explosions drives this point home in the film. There's the fact that John F. Kennedy (and his brother, for that matter) did not live to see the seed he planted grow to fruition under the administration of his nemesis, Richard Nixon.
Then there are the three astronauts who died before the project even got off the ground. And the fact that in the final moments before the lunar module actually touched down, it seemed pretty certain that the whole mission would fail because they couldn't find a suitable place to land in the narrow window of time they had to do it. And there's the speech Nixon was to give if the first mission didn't make it back. In one of the film's more eerie moments, one of the astronauts reads it.
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