Very well done doc about the Apollo project told by the now aging astronauts who have been to the moon. They've had time to get used to telling about it, but the do it in a very enjoyable and at times eloquent way. The film is well designed and edited. It doesn't go mission by mission, but rather, each speaks about their experience at lift off, then en route, landing, exploring, etc.

I wonder how well this will connect with younger people. There was a decent Sunday afternoon crowd, but a lot of white hair. I would expect at least 2/3 got in with a senior discount. We are the people who remember the times and the events. I don't know if my sons would appreciate this history the same way. As one of the astronauts says at the beginning, his father was born just after the Wright Brothers, and could hardly believed he had gone to the moon; his son was five years old and thought it was no big deal.

Interesting note at the end of the credits: Filmed entirely on location on the Earth, space and the Moon.

One of the greatest marketing tragedies of recent years was Disney's handling of America's Heart and Soul -- a film which needed to play in the suburbs and the Midwest. But it was "slow-released" to the major NY and LA markets, then trickled out to the second urban tier, where it died a very quick death. It was then ditched on the home video market with hardly any fanfare whatever.

In my interview with David Sington, director of In the Shadow, he expressed this:



He's so right. Though the film has been getting excellent reviews from critics and festival-goers, the real audience for this film is not in the cities.

Coming to the VIFF at the end of the month. Don't know about general release plans after that, though I have seen the poster in at least one multiplex.

I'm not sure the "cities" is a problem. It was well received when we saw it, but as I said, it was an older crowd. And in this area, the crowd could have included people who worked in some capacity on the Apollo program. For people of my age and older, this is nostalgia. Will it carry the same emotion for those who see it as ancient history? Keep in mind, all the astronauts are now in their 70s. The last moon walk was about 35 years ago.

I don't remember the doc For All Mankind. I wonder how different this one is from that. I imagine the structure is different -- FAM probably more a chronological structure than Shadow. Certainly From the Earth to the Moon (HBO series) was a far more extensive look at the space program and Apollo.

Only in the sense of age demographics, as you've mused. This is a lot more likely to work as a family experience in Boulder that it would in Seattle, for instance.


FAM documented a single representative trip from Cape Canaveral to the moon and back, including EVAs in Earth orbit, using NASA footage exlusively -- culled from footage from all the various missions. As a result, it was fascinating, but not terribly involving; impersonal, and gorgeous. It was less artistic in ambition, and more purely documentarian. The biggest thing was that it won the Oscare -- and so it became one of those "Yeah, I heard about it" things without too many people having actually seen it. I had to go out of my way to track it down at the SIFF here in Seattle; if it actually played in a theatre, it only did so for a week or so. (IMDb lists the total gross as $770K.)


Fans of the HBO series will get a hoot out of "meeting" the actual astronauts dramatized and featured in the series, like Scott and Schmidt.

I really liked Charley Duke and Alan Bean.

In the Shadow of the Moon tells the story of the Apollo moon missions from the perspectives of (some of) the astronauts who flew them. It interweaves present-day interviews with Apollo-era film footage. The astronauts, some of whom are now pushing eighty, seem less reserved, and more reflective, than they have in previous documentaries that I have seen them in. We learn, in the director's commentary track that is included among the extras on the DVD release, that each astronaut was interviewed for the better part of two days. Maybe the longer interview format conduced to a freer, more open, exchange. Then, too, the almost forty years that have passed since these momentous events occurred provide needed perspective, both for the astronauts and for us. The Cold War, which was always the ultimate basis for the space "race," is now well behind us. NASA, although it is still generally well-regarded by the public, has been humbled by two Shuttle tragedies and the continuing lack, since the moon, of a galvanizing goal the public could embrace.

It's worth remembering that when these men joined NASA in the 1960s, Mickey Mantle, revered by a generation of American boys as a paragon of moral and physical perfection, was still an American idol. Only later did we learn that Mr. Mantle was, in fact, an alcoholic, and that his public persona didn't much resemble his private life during those years. Only later, Ball Four was written, Watergate happened, and so on. We're too wise for this kind of hero worship anymore, aren't we? Or, is it that we're just too wizened? Because perhaps a measure of hero worship is called for, when we attempt to take the measure of these remarkable men. Those who follow astronaut lore know that becoming an astronaut is a group rite of passage. The word goes forth - "NASA needs astronauts" - and the applications arrive. Many are called, few are chosen. Although the first group of (seven) astronauts who flew the Mercury missions was the most iconic, some cognoscenti believe that the second group of (nine) astronauts may actually have been the better group. Many of the Apollo mission commanders came from this second group but, in fact, each of the first five groups of astronauts had at least one member who flew to the moon.

What shines through in the interviews is the simple humanity, sensitivity, and dedication of these men. Although screen time is not evenly distributed between the men - due, no doubt, to the centrality of Apollo 11 in the film's structure - we do get a chance to know each of them as individuals. The Apollo 11 Commander, Neil Armstrong, rather predictably, didn't participate in the making of this film, although he is seen in the Apollo-era footage. He has always been extraordinarily protective of his privacy. It is left to Armstrong's Apollo 11 crewmates, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin, to tell the story of the mission that first landed on the moon. Collins and Aldrin are fascinating men, and yet very different from each other. Collins, to my mind, is the best chronicler among the astronauts. Several years after Apollo 11 he wrote what is still the most highly-praised book that any astronaut has written: Carrying the Fire. I could listen to him for hours and hardly notice the passage of time - he's that good a storyteller. Aldrin, who has acknowledged battling depression and other demons, is a complex man, and remarkably intelligent. One can see, in his face, some things that don't seem to be present in the other men, and he, in particular, is someone I wish I had the opportunity to know personally.

The film skips over the two missions immediately prior to Apollo 11 with only the barest of mentions (some momentary text appears on the screen). The omission may be defensible, from the film's point of view, but these two missions - Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 - so often get short shrift in films like this, that I feel compelled to at least briefly mention them here. It's true that Apollo 9 didn't go to the moon (it stayed in earth orbit) but it marked the maiden voyage of the Lunar Module, perhaps the pinnacle of Apollo engineering and, arguably, the hardware "star" of the film. Parenthetically, it's worth noting that the critically-acclaimed HBO miniseries about Apollo, From the Earth to the Moon, which I thought at once slack and overwrought, and generally a mess, positively sparkled only in the episode that dealt with Apollo 9. Apollo 10 was a "trial run" for Apollo 11, in that it did everything Apollo 11 would do, except for descending the last 50,000 feet down to the surface of the moon in the Lunar Module. Crucially, it featured the first lunar-orbit rendezvous. One can argue that these two missions had to be excluded from the film, due to structure and time constraints, but then how is it that there was time enough to include yet another retelling of Apollo 13, a story that has already been definitively told in the movie Apollo 13? A saving grace is that the extras on the DVD do include a nice section on Apollo 9 and Apollo 10. We get to hear Gene Cernan's wonderful call to Capcom Charlie Duke, as Cernan and Tom Stafford are buzzing along at 3,000 mph, not that far above the lunar craters and mountains, "We is go and we is down among 'em, Charlie!"

But as interesting as the moon is, when experienced close up, it's still a barren, lifeless world. By way of glorious contrast, the earth, when seen from the moon is, in Jim Lovell's memorable words, "a grand oasis in the big vastness of space." The sight of the earth not only mesmerized every Apollo crew that saw it, it was life-altering for many of the astronauts. Incredibly, when the first lunar mission's extensive photographic flight plan was assembled, no one even thought of taking any pictures of the earth from the moon. As Apollo 8 was circling the moon, at the moment when the earth came into view around the lunar horizon, Frank Borman - as buttoned-down and no-nonsense an astronaut as ever suited up - spotted it first. He instantly sounded thirty years younger as he pointed out the awe-inspiring sight to his crewmates, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. There followed a quick scramble to get the shot, "Hand me that roll of color film, will you - quick!" or words to that effect. Bill Anders snapped the famous photo, which became the paradigmatic image of the Apollo program. The Apollo 8 mission, it should be noted, was superbly documented in an hour-long PBS production in 2005, for the American Experience series, that was titled Race to the Moon. Interestingly enough, a surprising number of NASA insiders actually consider Apollo 8, rather than Apollo 11, to have been the high-water mark of the Apollo program.

In closing, I think it's a shame that Pete Conrad (Apollo 12 Commander) didn't live long enough to have been a part of this film. Pete died in 1999 as a result of a motorcycle accident. Pete was a prankster, a live wire, and one of the best astronauts ever. Pete Conrad was an original. Even his tombstone says so...

http://providencelc.org/thenoyesfamily/pho...stone_front.JPG

And the back of his tombstone lists all of his missions...

http://providencelc.org/thenoyesfamily/pho..._stone_rear.JPG

One day, in the not-too-distant future, there won't be any men still alive who went to the moon, and that will be a sad day indeed. But we'll be able to keep these men, and their accomplishments, in our collective memories, in part because of worthy documentaries like this one.

Mike McIntyre

I would like to add some thoughts that I withheld from my previous remarks about this documentary, because I knew that if I added them they would tend to hijack what I wanted to say. They would have turned my mini-review into a critique based on what the film is not, instead of an appreciation of what the film is. But here, as a separate post, I will essay to make a different, and somewhat larger, point.

It's apparent that we are in the midst of an ongoing, albeit modest, revival of interest in Apollo-era achievements. It's difficult to pinpoint how and when this revival began, but I think that Ron Howard's film Apollo 13, which was released in 1995, has as fair a catalytic claim as any. During this revival, however, none of the cinematic treatments that I have seen (save one, and it only in part) have focused on what may be the most pivotal element of the grand narrative of going to the moon: the Saturn V rocket.

To be sure, all the films, whetever their focus, pay brief homage to the Saturn V. For example, in the excellent cable documentary Failure Is Not an Option (2003), about a minute was devoted to the Saturn V. Gene Kranz quite generously said something to the effect that, in his opinion, it was the greatest miracle of technology in the Apollo program. But Failure Is Not an Option was not about the Saturn V, it was about flight controllers, and so a brief glimpse of the Saturn V was all we got.

In the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, the Saturn V homage displayed unusual subtlety. It occurred, inevitably, in the "launch" sequence. NASA-supplied super-slow-motion film was used from the point of engine ignition to the point the Saturn V cleared the launch tower. It's obligatory that we see this kind of footage, and it never fails to impress, but it's been done before in so many documentaries that it's beginning to feel a bit shopworn. Interestingly, and in contrast to other film treatments, the score here was curiously restrained and understated.

It turned out that the director and the composer were keeping their powder dry. They were holding back their full choir and orchestral arrangement for the simply smashing sequence that followed hard upon.

The centerpiece of this sequence was a spectacular long-distance shot of the Saturn V in full-powered flight, still fully intact (i.e. before the first stage cutoff and separation), and still visible to the watching crowds below. In the shot, the Saturn V was oriented at roughly three-quarters vertical (i.e. pointing at the upper-right corner of the frame). Its 364-foot length was tiny within the frame, and one could see most of the nearly half-mile long flame that trailed the first stage engines.

This long-distance shot of the rocket was juxtaposed, in the first place, with a series of close and medium shots of specific faces of spectators in the grandstands. Let's just say that each face was grinning widely. I would have used a certain vulgar adjective to describe their grins, but mindful of my environs, I will refrain from using the coprophagous reference. In the second place, were juxtaposed brief clips of the astronauts, mostly Gene Cernan, in the present-day, describing what it was like to ride the Saturn V up into space.

The whole sequence didn't last long - I think it was not much more than about a minute in length - but it was an emotional, 360-degree view of an event that no one who lived it will ever forget. It's the high-point of the film, in my opinion, and I'm not just saying so because it happens to fit my topic at hand.

(Although the film made not the slightest gesture or reference to it, one can't help but contrast the joyous faces in that Florida grandstand, on July 16, 1969, with the grief-stricken faces in a similar (the same?) grandstand, seared into a nation's consciousness, on the cold morning of January 28, 1986. Such is the stark contrast between creation and annihilation.)

The aforementioned partial exception to the pattern of Saturn V neglect was the 2006 cable miniseries Space Race: The Untold Story, inasmuch as it prominently featured Wernher von Braun, the man who headed up the development of the Saturn V. It also featured von Braun's quasi-equivalent in the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev. The story revolved around the competition between the two men, and the two countries. On paper, it sounded good.

The execution of this miniseries, however, was very disappointing. There was just way too much narration, and the whole affair was stiff and lifeless. The Korolev character succeeded, at least to some degree, but the von Braun character was completely uncharismatic, thus failing in what was probably von Braun's most characteristic trait.

And so we come to Wernher von Braun. Aye, there's the rub, and the true explanation, I think, for why directors have shied away from the Saturn V story. If your film is going to be Ameri-centric, if it's going to cheer on those good ol' Americans, with their good ol' American values, to the moon, it doesn't quite work to have the men primarily responsible for the Saturn V rocket be a bunch of, ahem, Germans - to include ex-Nazi party members, ex-SS men, etc. No sirree. That won't do at all. Or so it's thought.

Worst of all, von Braun himself was tainted. For years his involvement in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp was carefully suppressed. But now we know the truth about von Braun's involvement, or at least as much of the truth as we'll probably ever know, and it simply doesn't lend itself to a facile, Disney-esque presentation (Walt Disney, of course, put von Braun on his television show in the 1950s, thus propelling von Braun into America's consciousness).

Now, a great director should relish the prospect of making an honest film about von Braun. And yes, I know that a film was made about von Braun, around 1960, but that doesn't count. The truth wasn't known then. Von Braun was a man with a terrible secret in his past, yes, but he was nevertheless a great man. He was, in the first place, a superb engineer, but where he really excelled was in knowing how to motivate and keep together a team of engineers, all working towards a common goal.

Many of the engineers who worked for von Braun stayed with him for life. For them, there was no question of their ever leaving him, even for positions in industry that would have paid them more, or given them more authority. This degree of loyalty is rarely seen, in any field of endeavor, and to understand von Braun, one must understand how and why he engendered such loyalty. To go into the specifics would fill a book, or a feature-length film; in a word: charisma. Von Braun had it in bucketfuls, which is why Space Race: The Untold Story was a flop.

We still await the definitive film or documentary about the Saturn V and the people who built it.

Yeah, Lerher's satire was classic alright. Thanks for posting it! Of course, Lehrer just thought von Braun was an unscrupulous opportunist. He knew nothing about von Braun's SS membership or his role in Mittelbau-Dora, even though these facts had been published in East Germany in 1963. The western press completely ignored the story at the time.

Someone should also find and post a clip of the Strangelove character saying "Mein Führer, I can walk!," which simply had to be targeted at von Braun.

If you're a fan of this genre (documentaries about manned space flight), you'll probably want to check out the Discovery Channel's six-hour series titled When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, which debuts tonight at 9 pm E/P. There are a number of positive mentions in the popular media (e.g. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25011532/). The archival footage has been remastered by the Discovery Channel for broadcast in high definition (HD). There are lots of interview segments, too, which apparently go beyond "the usual suspects." Neil Armstrong even agreed to be interviewed. The first two episodes air tonight, with two more episodes on each of the following two Sundays.

Mike McIntyre

The two episodes last night, on Projects Mercury and Gemini, were just okay, in my opinion. I mean the transfer to high definition is nice and all but, thematically, most of this ground has been covered before, e.g. in Failure Is Not an Option. One thing that was new, and most welcome, was the attention paid to Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom. Both his Mercury and his Gemini missions were highlighted. I can only assume that this emphasis is laying groundwork for the upcoming Apollo episode where the Apollo 1 fire - the fire in which Grissom (along with White and Chaffee) perished - is sure to be prominent. If they know him at all, most people know, at most, two things about Gus Grissom: 1) he died in the Apollo 1 fire, and 2) after his Mercury capsule splashed down, it sank in the Atlantic when its hatch blew open prematurely. Some speculated that Grissom "panicked" and blew the hatch open himself, although there was no evidence to support this, and it would have run counter to the man's background and nature. It's nice to see Gus Grissom receive his just due in this documentary. He was a highly competent astronaut and engineer. (Full disclosure: I graduated from Virgil I. Grissom High School in Huntsville, Alabama.)

Mike McIntyre

This past Sunday episodes three and four of When We Left Earth covered from Apollo 1 through Skylab. Very little time was spent on the Apollo 1 fire, which surprised me a little. As I mentioned in my last post, I thought Grissom (as well as White) may have received more attention than they often do, as a setup for Apollo 1.

It's clear, by now, that this documentary takes a workmanlike, by-the-numbers approach to the material. It covers the essentials of each mission, but there's no time to delve or dally. It's always 'on to the next mission...' The advantage: missions like Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 which, as I noted previously, are habitually dropped in most documentaries, are shown here, and quite nicely. The disadvantage: you do run the risk of boring the pants off of all but aficionados like me, if you just go through the missions one by one. It requires directorial skill to avoid this trap. I thought that the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon showed real ingenuity in this respect. It used the Apollo 11 mission as a basic framework, but comments and observations from the astronauts of the other Apollo moon missions were mixed in too. In When We Left Earth I don't get the sense that the linearity of the narrative was seen as a potential problem. The only mission that seems to me to get more than its carefully rationed share of time on-screen is - you guessed it - Apollo 13. Apollo 13 is becoming the Achilles' heel of this genre, in my opinion. The documentarians seem unable to resist the urge to milk this mission. It's a dry hole, boys!

Minor misgivings aside, When We Left Earth redeemed itself in my book when, in the last part of episode four, it detailed the Skylab missions, and particularly Skylab I. By the time Skylab rolled around, the public had largely lost interest in space, thought space expenditures a waste of money, etc. As a result, few were paying attention when the drama with Skylab unfolded. Although human lives were not at risk in the same way they were with Apollo 13, it took some incredibly fine and creative work to rescue Skylab. It's great to see the Skylab story finally get into a documentary.

The documentary In the Shadow of the Moon is being aired tonight on the Discovery Channel at 9 pm Eastern.