100% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 67 reviews)
Runtime: 93 minutes
Directed by: Todd Douglas Miller
Starring: This is a documentary
From: NEON
This was a very good documentary, which I saw with a less than good crowd:
Those that have or will see this, I hope you have or had a better audience than I did.
I say that as it was a crowd of mainly old people, which in of itself is fine... except that several of them wouldn't shut their damn mouths while the movie was playing. I wasn't happy about that, but then again from Thursday to now things have not always been great for me. It's many minor things, so I'll explain no further what I am referring to here. I at least saw this yesterday, and found it to be very good. It is on some but not all IMAX screens in the United States for the upcoming week.
It is straightforward, a look at the Apollo 11 mission from just before launch to after the three astronauts splash down back on Earth. There is no narration and instead you hear soundbites from a variety of sources. This is augmented by a tremendous by Matt Morton, which I understand was created with late 60's instruments yet it sounds modern. Some of the footage hadn't been seen before as it was only recently unearthed, and most of the film looked gorgeous in IMAX. While I knew the story already, I loved seeing the journey and the acknowledgment that Mission Control played an important role in this historic moment.
The way this was put together also reminded me of a movie of the early 70's. Often there is split-screen and it's not just two images... there are usually more than that. Seeing For All Mankind and Moonwalk One right before this movie was pretty fortuitous on my part, as an ending title thanked the directors of this movies (Al Reinert and Theo Kamecke, respectively), footage from the latter was used here and the animation to show the journey was almost identical between Moonwalk One and Apollo 11. This was a nice commemoration of a great achievement in human history, and this shows just how difficult it was in 1969 to pull off such a task.
One last thing: a great “I saw what you did there” moment was when the only fictional trailer that played beforehand was for the new Nancy Drew movie... because a minor character wears a NASA t-shirt at one point.
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