This documentary, found streaming on Hulu, has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards, and it is well worth watching. It isn't like other documentaries about the first moon mission. In fact
it isn't like most other movies, period. It's magnificent and unique,
an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill.
The filmmaker tells the story entirely in the
present tense, omitting the historian interviews and vintage news
clips that you expect to see in films on this topic. Even though the
filmmaker gained access to previously-unseen archival footage and
previously-unheard audio recordings, and synced them to create an almost
vertigo-inducing sense of immediacy, this isn't a history lesson. It is a thriller, the story unfolding before us.
For example, the familiar voice of Walter Cronkite is heard but not seen, and his voice is given no more dramatic weight
than the voices of NASA announcers, supervisors and technicians speaking
into headsets. The most exhilerating moments—the liftoff; the landing; the
departure from the lunar surface; the descent through Earth's
atmosphere—are conveyed mostly in unbroken images, taken from a fixed
vantage point (such as the shot through a capsule window during re-entry
that shows flames roasting the spacecraft's heat shield). The movie
is intuitively assembled, fond of the grand gesture, and often playful. Highly recommended.
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