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Thursday, January 16, 2020

Apollo 11 (2019)

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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