For All Mankind (1989)

For All Mankind (Al Reinert, 2007) Revisiting Reinert's documentary after so many years—I saw it when it first came out in 1989, as I was a space-kid/nerd growing up—is like visiting an old friend. 

Reinert conceived of the film after hearing about all this "unseen NASA footage" and deciding to make a true film, just the footage and Brian Eno's soundtrack, showing the various missions to the Moon one by one—simple and stark. 

Preview audiences didn't like it. So, Reinert went back to the editing room, abandoned the chronological stricture and added in the commentaries of Apollo astronauts on the soundtrack—disembodied and unidentified. First person histories without credit. No dour narration as sober and serious as an undertaker's reassurances, but reminiscenses, told as if around a camp-fire, interspersed with the mission audio to keep the narrative thread going.

It starts as it should with Kennedy:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.

Address at Rice University, 09-12-1962

It's a very loose thread, combining all the footage from the missions into one, from suiting up to coming home, with the crews in the footage changing as the film highlights activities every step of the way, combining into one mash-up of a lunar mission, the greatest hits of found footage from the greatest adventure made by humankind.

And the commentaries are fascinating, low-key and descriptive. Apollo 10's Tom Stafford, not the most poetic of men, shows his television audience, saying "...makes you realize what you have back there on Earth. The Earth is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space." He's going to the Moon, but his thoughts are of the home-port, expressed in a way showing himself separate from his fellow earthlings. 

Another talks about looking out into the blackness of space and muses: "What are you looking at? Call it the Universe, but it is the infinity of Space and the infinity of Time. I'm looking at something called 'Space' that has no end, and at Time...which has no meaning."

Charlie Duke muses about taking a sleeping pill after his first moon-walk and having a vivid dream about following tracks on the Moon and finding other astronauts who'd been there for thousands of years.

Take this, conspiracy hacks. Astronauts falling in 1/6th gravity.

(Kinda mess up the 1969-era cables you're looking for, wouldn't it?)*

There are video sequences of moon-walks of vast gray vistas, canyon-like craters, all with the scrunched closeness of the horizon on the smaller Moon—these are things I remember watching at 3 a.m in the morning as a child—an alien landscape of slow-motion dust and gradual prat-falls and grown men who were test-pilots skipping and bouncing like bunnies on the Moon, giggling, quite forgetting the fact a torn suit would mean oblivion.

Michael Collins explains why he took this picture: "Suddenly through the window I saw the two of them in the capsule and the Earth coming up behind. That's it. That's everyone."

Film-maker Reinert died last year, a year before the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11. But, in so many ways he showed the current crop of Apollo docu-makers the way, one shorn of chest-thumping, jingoism, and speechifying trying to defend the expenditure. Instead, it is a film of wonder, which, as we get farther away from the events—and going back seems further and further away ("Space Rangers" or no)—opens the doors of the NASA vaults, bringing to light hours and hours of footage not seen (not because of some conspiracy plot, but because there's so much of it, there weren't enough man-hours to go through it all, as well as the truth being that nobody cared, as the media seemed saturated with the same images endlessly recycled, and the public lost any interest—or as John Oliver put it "when Americans looked to their highest aspirations and said 'Ah, f@#k it'**).

All that access and technology might have taken away some of the majesty and mystery of going to another world. Who cared about dirty space-suits, cramped capsules and program alarms, when you could watch the pristine—and fictional—"Star Trek" every week and go to conventions of the fanatical. Now, the only fanatics for NASA are the conspiracy theorists (and they're no fun to cosplay). But, America's sights went beyond the horizon, the short-termed and the short-sighted. At the time, we just wanted to beat the Russians. But, even as the American Experiment has evolved beyond overthrowing an absent landlord to considering the very functions of government and rights of the governed, NASA's mission evolved to go beyond agreed-upon borders and consider the sanctity of the very thing it had set its sights to leave..."for all mankind."

That's everyone.

* Filmed in the studio—as babbled by conspiracy-loons—on such a grand scale using 1969 technology? Such poppy-cock. Delusional poppy-cock. And just to make me feel good, here's a video of "Buzz" Aldrin punching one of them:

And some experts weigh in:

And here's one that might be a little technical for the simple-minded:

**