One for the Nerds
or "It's a View Worth the Price of the Trip"
Apollo 11(The Imax Experience) is a new film by Todd Douglas Miller using old film by NASA that has sat in vaults for years and years and years gathering Earth-dust, with no eyes to peer upon them and wonder. Why? Budget cuts—it takes man-hours to review the reams of data and artifacts of the Moon Landings and NASA—at the time—was busy with other things like 1) trying to land men on the Moon and 2) trying to legitimize its budget and very existence once having done so. What sets this documentary apart from the many that will be seen this week is its source material—for much of it, particularly the launch of the initial Saturn 5 booster rocket to send the crew on the first leg of its mission and its recovery 8 days later, was shot using 70mm film, which—when you see it in IMAX (which is how I saw it)—is startlingly clear and defined. One wonders at the power of the Saturn 5 engines vibrating out of focus at the launch, so close you can practically see rivets, or the sense of how hot it was in the viewing stands, every trail of sweat and every pore on the faces of the viewers.
One would think one had seen it all, but Miller (working for CNN Films) takes a different approach—excising all narration, any commentary, footage of talking heads, or witness verification, even (that staple of CNN documentaries) "expert impressions"—to tell the complete story with raw film and audio (enhanced, as always, for dramatic purposes) taken as it happened. One might think this was a simple process, but consider this—nobody had bothered syncing the 32 channels of audio (11,000 hours worth) recorded over the radios in Houston Control with the footage they had shot. Just the thought of that process makes this old recording engineer break out in more of a sweat than if I'd been sitting in the Florida stands that hot July day of the launch.
Certainly, there may be things folks might not want to see—there are one too many shots of Johnny Carson in the stands for me—and Miller does make the footage tell a comprehensive story, especially in the films opening minutes when he has the most material. Once the film settles into the mission itself, footage becomes more scarce and he does a fine job of stretching out the trip without feeling like you're watching reel-ends and discarded footage. Anything that you need to know not provided by the live audio is produced with some nifty graphics with no one having to point out that it was a historic mission or that "this was a critical moment for the crew." It assumes our intelligence—human beings DID go to the Moon, after all—and doesn't waste time with the obvious.
The men—and one woman—of Kennedy Launch Control.
This certainly pays off in certain sequences: the actual landing footage, which we've probably seen more than enough times (but cleaned up to 8k resolution which makes a huge difference), from a single movie camera stuck in a corner of the Lunar Module's triangular windows at an odd angle, properly synced to the audio (this time), while graphics read out speed, altitude, and more importantly—fuel. It would be inaccurate to say that the LM was running on fumes when it landed, but it had certainly gone past the point of safety—your car's gas reminder indicator would have gone off quite awhile before...but Armstrong couldn't look for the nearest gas station. He had to commit...or quit. It's nerve-wracking...especially when you see the moment between alarms, warnings about fuel, that Armstrong sees that they're heading for a dangerous crater, takes over manually and jams the Lunar Module forward to avoid it...while he's running out of fuel.
Another nifty touch...I found it nifty, others might see it as a snooze—the sequences where Apollo 11 fires its engines behind the Moon to fall into its gravity well, and the critical moment when they have to fire it again to get out of orbit and return to Earth. Miller just lets the film run while putting up a graphics display showing speed, length of firing of the engine...read-outs...you watch the speed indicator drop (or speed up) while watching the actual results of it on the film. It feels like you're in the driver's seat and there's a palpable sense of "being there" watching the Moon slow down as the speed drops—and jolt forward when it starts up again. That was a fun little ride.
And Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins? The guys who had to pull it off and had been scrutinized, examined, thrown in the glare of a spotlight never anticipated, and, uniquely were isolated before and after the Mission? They're laconic. Collins was the jokester among the crew and even his humor was martini-dry. But, in the suiting up for the launch, you can see it in Armstrong's eyes. The pressure. He looks like he's barely gotten any sleep the night before. And after the prescribed steak-and-eggs breakfast (which feels a bit like a last meal), he puts on all the gear—they all do, and there's a tentativeness to their expressions. Armstrong was a reticent guy, not much of a smiler, but the determination and antsiness on his face are palpable. He may put on a "public grin" for the cameras walking to his transport, but there is no joy in it, and, indeed, there won't be a smile visible until Aldrin snaps one of the few shots of him during the Mission—all the Moon walk shots are of Aldrin, except two (and in one of them, he's reflected in Aldrin's face-mask)—after they're back inside the Lunar Module.
And it's a smile of relief. They'd done it. All the potential disasters that Armstrong had deliberately worked against in the simulators back in Houston—resulting in many crashes (to Aldrin's chagrin)—did not happen. Well, they happened. But, Armstrong had a support system back in Mission Control that could radio back in seconds that his targeting computer was getting over-loaded from three sources of information...and tell him to ignore it...keep flying. Stick the landing. That's your job. Everything else is nothing.
It's probably why Armstrong comes back effusive in his praise of the technicians. They had his back 240,000 miles...and a one 1/4-second delay away. Yeah, it may seem like a three man job...but only because hundreds of people were checking all the things the crew didn't have the bandwidth...or time...to learn about the millions of details that went into landing on the Moon. And we're still learning about them some 50 years later.
Armstrong can smile after his day on the Moon...finally.
Al Bean's opinion of Apollo 8's lunar reading of Genesis
"As many stars as there are in the heavens," that's how many documentaries there've been about the Apollo moon landings: The officially propagandistic NASA exercises, full of facts and jargon and about as exciting as a shareholders' report (which, in fact, they are); the private documentaries that re-use the same footage and cliches over again; the ones produced by the news conglomerates, with anchor-people front and center (we're not even considering the garage-produced Capricorn One conspiracy lunacies)*; then there's For All Mankind, which artfully combined NASA footage (taken from the original negatives), narrated by unseen and anonymous astronauts.
Now, along comes In the Shadow of the Moon, and it tries to do something different. Of course, there's the basic overview: Kennedy, Apollo 1, turmoil, Apollo 8, "one small step for a man...," but where For All Mankind emphasized a cosmic timelessness, Shadow leaves you with the impression that time is passing quickly, especially in that tiny sliver of the cosmic clock when a small fraternity of men walked two worlds.
It's been 48 years since someone trod the moon and those men are now retired, from the military and their business interests. So, the filmmakers gathered together most of the surviving Apollo-nauts** (the one hold-out being the reclusive Neil Armstrong, who might have overshadowed--no pun intended--the others), and instead of asking the basic "tell us what it was like," the question is: "How did you feel?" How did you feel training for years for a mission before millions of people, being shoved into space on the point of a 36 story pencil, performing the thousands of items on a check-list to become the single most isolated men in recorded history. How did you feel walking on the moon? What was it like to look up and see your Earth hanging above you?
These and other questions are answered, like Al Bean (Apollo 12) saying that as a test-pilot he resented Alan Shepard flying "faster, higher, louder than me and doing it in front of millions of people," so he signed up for astronaut duty. Mike Collins (Apollo 11) talks about how his hours spent alone behind the moon out of communication with anybody, made him think about the millions of people on the other side of the moon, and whether he might actually—genuinely—BE alone on his side of space. Eugene Cernan (Apollo 17) talks about the fireball generated at stage separations and how each stage kicks them through it. They all talk about the pangs they felt seeing the Earth in space. Ed Mitchell (Apollo 14) comes to an epiphany that everything in his sight-line is born of the same star-stuff. Collins, Buzz Aldrin--they don't even acknowledge his real first name "Edwin"--and Capcom Charlie Duke all talk about the tension of the first lunar landing by Apollo 11 (Cernan makes the comment that Armstrong has "cool stones"). Bean talks about why you never wanted to sit next to Aldrin at a party (he'd want to talk about orbital mechanics), and Aldrin reveals his own personal "first on the moon" story.
They are old men now, not the brash test-pilots in their 30's, and with twinkles in their eyes and the freedom of not having to answer to anybody anymore, their answers are reflective, humorous, slightly "gee-whizzy" at their own accomplishments and all too human. It's like listening to grand-paw talk about the days living in a log cabin. Cernan leans back effusively and relaxed, like he's taking in the world. Aldrin sits forward, hunched, telling secrets. Collins sits stock still, but his head bobs and ducks and weaves like an elder Jimmy Stewart.
The images are startling too. A lone worker working on a Saturn-5 rocket nozzle becomes dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the booster as the camera slides back. The launch footage from the gantry POV is from the one Apollo mission that took off at night. There are long takes of the dance of fire and ice at lift-off. And there is the footage of booster separation from a camera located inside the discarded booster, but Shadow lets the film continue as, falling back, the Earth heaves into view. In fact, many of the best moments of the film are because the film-makers took the risk of showing the film to the end of each roll.
And there is one amazing find. A 1962 episode of "To Tell the Truth," with Neil Armstrong's parents as guests. Their secret? "Our son became an astronaut today!" Cut to Garry Moore asking Mrs. Armstrong: "And what would you say to your son if he became the first man on the moon?" That she loves him and to be careful, of course. In the Shadow of the Moon is full of such moments of discovery and homespun wisdom.
* The End Credits have the astronauts commenting on the conspiracy theories about staged moon landings in hangars. Cernan gets defensive-"Nobody is going to take those footsteps on the Moon away from me!" Charlie Duke's response is the best: "I can see faking it once, but why in the world would you do it NINE TIMES!!" Nobody thought of this conspiracy theory until Capricorn One came out. You'd think the loons would pick a less crappy movie to make a stink about. But, then, rocket scientists don't read the National Enquirer. ** The deceased Apollo astronauts are Pete Conrad (Apollo 12), Fred Haise and Jack Swigert (Apollo 13), Alan Shepard (Apollo 14), and Jim Irwin (Apollo 15).
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:
“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
Astronaut John Glenn
The Man in the Glass Booth
or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I read James R. Hanson's biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, "First Man" some months ago—I'd always been fascinated by the American Space Program of the 1960's when I was a kid—and I found the book a tedious slog. Despite my interest, it tested my ability to be fascinated by Armstrong's career, going into such extreme depth as listing Armstrong's scores during military flight training in the 1960's and the grind of astronaut training...as well as the author's fervently pushed sub-text that Armstrong was a mythical figure on a par with Adam. Plus, Armstrong was such a tight-lipped, interior soul that one got the impression that, despite the scrutiny and coverage of his career before and after the first moon landing, the man was pretty much a cipher, so unknowable that the author depended on other people's impressions to such a large extent that one never really got the sense that you knew the man, and certainly never warmed to him. The flaws were the most interesting things about him: he was an ace test-pilot but a horrible driver, seemingly never able to concentrate on the road, he had a stoicism that kept him apart from those he loved—his grueling schedule usually ensured that, anyway—and he was an innate problem-solver, which did him well at his job of controlling machines, but, on a human level, stymied him, particularly in the challenge of death—of Navy comrades, his only daughter Karen,***and fellow astronauts (particularly Ed White, his next-door neighbor) killed in the process of the head-long rush to achieve the Moon landing within a ten year time-span.
With Armstrong's death in 2012, it was probably inevitable that they would make a film of Armstrong's life.*First Man encapsulates (pun intended) the intense period of Armstrong's life between the tail-end of his time testing X-15 rocket-planes to the moon landing of Apollo 11, a period of 8 years.**It begins with a disorienting shot looking out through grimy windows from the cockpit of an X-15. The camera buffets wildly. The noise is deafening, from the wind-shear, the clacking instruments, the creaking strains on the metal exterior, the rattling of anything not bolted down in the little compartment, the squawking chatter of the radio. Everything except the rattling of the pilot's teeth. That X-15 is strapped to the underside of a B-52 and it will be dropped like a bomb, and, once it's fallen far enough to safely do so without blowing up its host-plane, the pilot will light up its rocket engines and take the X to its limits (which turned out to be a height of 67 miles and a maximum speed of 4,520 miles per hour). That plummeting drop might be the calmest part of the ride, because once the engines kick in, the X-15 is a shaking, vibrating brick that gets red hot in the friction of the atmosphere. Now the film is in 3-D (I didn't see it in that format or in IMAX), but, if it was also presented in Sensurround it would be intolerable. Damned effective in communicating what it's like in that circumstance, but probably beyond what a casual viewer munching popcorn could handle. It's a neat primer on what First Man does differently in the depiction of space travel that separates it from previous films on the subject in regards to the actual experience of the pioneers doing it.
For First Man, like its subject, is not exactly romantic when it comes to the Conquest of Space, but is, instead, realistic and practical. While most films look at the tiny vessels contrasted with the vastness of the space they're pushing through, First Man keeps you in the cockpit, from the vantage point of the sailors strapped in for dear life, who are warily watching the attitude indicators of their control panels as opposed to dreamily gazing at the stars out the window. Zero G is not something to be luxuriated in, it's a problem to be worked around, so that a stray foot doesn't hit the wrong toggle-switch and the floating clutter doesn't get in the way of the job.
Armstrong might have been the perfect candidate for the job. He loved flying and he loved the problem-solving of the task, trying to get it "just so" in the engineering from the time he had his siblings throwing out balsa wood airplanes from his window, so he could mark with popsicle sticks stuck in the yard the differences his adjustment would make in their aerodynamics. When the film starts in medias res of that X-15 flight, Armstrong goes too high and too fast, so that he ends up "skipping off the atmosphere" and has to find a radical way to use his attitude jets to give him enough drag to get the X-15 back to the ground. He makes it, but glances are passed between the ground crew: Armstrong's flights have been shaky lately; something's going on.
I see the moon, the moon sees me shining through the leaves of the old oak tree Oh, let the light that shines on me shine on the one I love.
What's going on is shown in the next scene as a large menacing piece of chrome lowers to the head of a little girl; it is the Armstrong's daughter, Karen, and the worrying parents, Neil (Ryan Gosling) and Janet (Claire Foy), watch, their arms around each other, stricken—the child is being treated for a brain tumor, and, as we'll see, Armstrong keeps notebooks on her treatment, just as he does after his X-15 flights, but it's not going well. And over a shot of Armstrong watching over his sleeping daughter, as his fingers consider the strands of her hair, we hear a deliberate creaking of rope...
...it is the sound of her coffin being lowered into the ground, as Armstrong watches hollow-eyed. There will be flash-backs to the shot of her hair in his hands, the tactile sensation of his daughter later in the movie, but Armstrong, rarely—if ever—mentioned his daughter's death—at 2 1/2 years old—in the many interviews that he actually would allow. One can speculate, as Hanson, "writing to silence"****in the biography, did, that his daughter's death informed the course of Armstrong's actions for the rest of his life and probably played a hand in his becoming a "deist," after having been raised by the devoutest of mothers. But, Armstrong's life was a full one and, no matter how artfully done in the book or movie, it probably can't be thinned down to making his daughter Karen the "Rosebud" of the movie, the Rosetta Stone that has all the answers.
After these scenes, the film then turns episodic—as so many bio-pics do—between highlights and low-lights in Armstrong's astronaut career: his applying for NASA and acceptance (during his interview when he's being questioned, one of the NASA hierarchy starts "I'm sorry about your daughter." and Armstrong's reply is "I'm sorry, is there a question?"), some training footage (which will become pertinent later), the deaths of fellow astronauts Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, and Armstrong's pick as commander of Gemini 8, which would prove an essential stepping-stone to the Apollo moon landing; It's mission is to rendezvous and dock with a previously launched Agena target, which Armstrong pulls off smoothly until he's out of communication with Mission Control, at which point the two locked vehicles begin to spin wildly out of control, and Armstrong makes the decision to separate from the target vehicle thinking that it has malfunctioned.
Once that happens, the capsule begins to spin faster—it wasn't a fault with the Agena, it is with their own capsule, and as it begins to spin faster and faster, approaching speeds that will cause the astronauts to black out, Armstrong shuts down his main thruster systems on the ship, suspecting them as the problem, and uses the forward thrusters for re-entry to bring the vehicle out of its death-tumble, effectively ending the mission as required by NASA protocols. The mission is seen as both a success and a failure—yes, its objective was achieved, but it is aborted early, days before its scheduled conclusion, lest the already used thrusters become essential for an eventual return to Earth .
Once Armstrong is cleared of any failure on his part—he is, in fact, lauded for saving his own life and that of his crew-mate, Dave Scott, he is then used as a NASA ambassador among politicians, and it is on one of those junkets he hears of the Apollo 1 fire, which costs the lives of veteran astronauts Gus Grissom, his neighbor Ed White and Roger Chaffee.***** He also narrowly escapes his own fiery death by his last minute ejection from a lunar landing trainer that malfunctions and loses control.
The rest of the film follows his subsequent training and command for Apollo 11, which, planned to be the first lunar landing if all the objectives are met, is the most prized assignment among the astronauts, but bares heavy responsibility and scrutiny, something that only makes Armstrong withdraw further into his work and away from his family.
The work is isolating, and, given all the unknowns about the lunar surface and whether diseases might be brought back to Earth from contact with the soil, the crew is kept in hermetically sealed chambers for press conferences and maintain a restricted access. As if the suits and pressurized conditions aren't enough, it seems like layers upon layers are being put between Armstrong and his family. At one point, just before leaving for the isolation before the launch, Armstrong's wife Janet demands that he sits down with his sons and explains to them the danger of his mission...and that he might not come back, something Armstrong wants to avoid talking about given the company line of "highest confidence in the Mission." It goes awkwardly and with not the best of resolutions. No one is exactly comforted.
The tensest part of the film is, of course, the Moon Landing itself, as Armstrong has to pilot where no pilot has gone before to a landing field that is nothing but pot-holes that could break one of the lander's spindly legs, all the time that alarms are going off warning that the computer can't process all of the information being funneled to it, the lander is low of fuel and running on fumes, and its auto-pilot decides that it's going to land in a large crater strewn with crippling boulders. Armstrong has to yank control from the targeted systems, try and overshoot the crater's lip, draining the fuel even more before touching down on another world. It was tense when it was happening live on television 49 years ago, and it's just as tense when Chazelle has his choice of angles and a galloping soundtrack from his composer Jason Hurwitz.
Damien Chazelle has now made three movies (he's now 33)—Whiplash, First Man, and La La Land (which was made during the long and complicated pre-production of First Man) and those three movies could not be more different in style, genre, and energy, but each one is a confident and accomplished film about obsession and sacrifice in pursuit of a cherished goal. The other films were wild, fast-moving things that frequently soared, where First Man—which is all about soaring—has its most sublime moments in stillness and incredible silence. One can quibble with Gosling's performance as Armstrong being too morose, generally—one can't find any fault in Claire Foy's performance...at all—as Armstrong may have been restrained but hardly the "Debbie Downer" one might assume from this movie. But, as a portrait of a sacrificing hero, First Man quite triumphantly communicates the measure of a measured man.
* Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros. bought the rights to "First Man" in 2003, but the film never moved forward until acquired by Steven Spielberg for his Dreamworks Studio.
** Although Armstrong's boyhood fascination with model airplanes is hinted at by the sound of toy engines over the Universal/Dreamworks logos before the first image of the film—in the cockpit of an X-15—appears.
**** "Writing to silence" is a lovely little phrase that you can't "google" to any accuracy, but refers to the writerly act of speculation when there isn't anyone alive to provide the inspiration...or rebuttal...to what you commit to the page.
***** Okay, let's talk about the "flag" controversy. It's a non-issue, like complaining about no hedge monsters in The Shining. There are flags and stars and stripes all over First Man. But, for some reason...for some people...this discerning mature portrait of an American hero succeeds or fails on whether there's a scene of planting the American flag on the Moon (we DO see it, by the way, the flag, I mean). Okay, maybe these "critics" have their priorities (or something) "out of whack," but the filmmakers solved a potential problem that would REALLY get folks up in arms. One of the things that Armstrong revealed in the biography was that when he and Aldrin launched from the Moon's surface, the blast of the engine basically flattened the flag and knocked it to the ground. It wasn't stuck in very well as the astronauts had a hell of a time trying to hammer it deep enough into the clay-like lunar surface to make it anything other than precarious. Maybe nobody should mention it. Maybe those folks should find a way to get there and fix it. Maybe they should take a trip to the Moon.
The second group of selected astronauts responding to a direction to "stare off in the distance." Armstrong is in the upper-left looking up with his mouth agape.
*****
The ill-fated "Apollo 1" crew—White, Grissom and Chaffee—take a dim view of a model of their Apollo space capsule. At another time, Grissom hung a lemon on the capsule under construction.
***
The Armstrong's before NASA: Neil, son Eric, daughter Karen, Janet
-Al Bean's opinion of Apollo 8's lunar reading of Genesis
"As many stars as there are in the heavens," Yes, M-G-M used it for a promo-line, but it's also how many documentaries there've been about the Apollo moon landings: The officially propagandistic NASA exercises, full of facts and jargon and about as exciting as a shareholders' report (which, in fact, they are); the private documentaries that re-use the same footage and cliches over again; the ones produced by the news conglomerates, with anchor-people front and center (we're not even considering the garage-produced Capricorn One conspiracy lunacies)*; then there's For All Mankind, which artfully combined NASA footage (taken from the original negatives), narrated by unseen and anonymous astronauts.
Now, along comes In the Shadow of the Moon, and it tries to do something different. Of course, there's the basic overview: Kennedy, Apollo 1, turmoil, Apollo 8, "one small step for a man...," but where For All Mankind emphasized a cosmic timelessness, Shadow leaves you with the impression that time is passing quickly, especially in that tiny sliver of the cosmic clock when a small fraternity of men walked two worlds. It's been 35 years since someone trod the moon and those men are now retired, from the military and their business interests. So, the filmmakers gathered together most of the surviving Apollo-nauts** (the one hold-out being the reclusive Neil Armstrong, who might have overshadowed--no pun intended--the others), and instead of asking the basic "tell us what it was like," the question is: "How did you feel?" How did you feel training for years for a mission before millions of people, being shoved into space on the point of a 36 story pencil, performing the thousands of items on a check-list to become the single most isolated men in recorded history. How did you feel walking on the moon? What was it like to look up and see your Earth hanging above you?
These and other questions are answered, like Al Bean (Apollo 12) saying that as a test-pilot he resented Alan Shepard flying "faster, higher, louder than me and doing it in front of millions of people," so he signed up for astronaut duty. Mike Collins (Apollo 11) talks about how his hours spent alone behind the moon out of communication with anybody, made him think about the millions of people on the other side of the moon, and whether he might actually BE alone on his side of space. Eugene Cernan (Apollo 17) talks about the fireball generated at stage separations and how each stage kicks them through it. They all talk about the pangs they felt seeing the Earth in space. Ed Mitchell (Apollo 14) comes to an epiphany that everything in his sight-line is born of the same star-stuff. Collins, Buzz Aldrin—they don't even acknowledge his real first name "Edwin"—and Capcom Charlie Duke all talk about the tension of the first lunar landing by Apollo 11 (Cernan makes the comment that Armstrong has "cool stones"). Bean talks about why you never wanted to sit next to Aldrin at a party (he'd want to talk about orbital mechanics), and Aldrin reveals his own personal "first on the moon" story.
They are old men now, not the brash test-pilots in their 30's, and with twinkles in their eyes and the freedom of not having to answer to anybody, their answers are reflective, humorous, slightly "gee-whizzy" at their own accomplishments and all too human. It's like listening to grand-paw talk about the days living in a log cabin. Cernan leans back effusively and relaxed, like he's taking in the world. Aldrin sits forward, hunched, telling secrets. Collins sits stock still, but his head bobs and ducks and weaves like an elder Jimmy Stewart.
The images are startling too. A lone worker working on a Saturn-5 rocket nozzle becomes dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the booster as the camera slides back. The launch footage from the gantry POV is from the one Apollo mission that took off at night. There are long takes of the dance of fire and ice at lift-off. And there is the footage of booster separation from a camera located inside the discarded booster, but "Shadow" lets the film continue as, falling back, the Earth heaves into view. In fact, many of the best moments of the film are because the film-makers took the risk of showing the film to the end of each roll. And there is one amazing find. A 1962 episode of "To Tell the Truth," with Neil Armstrong's parents as guests. Their secret? "Our son became an astronaut today!" Cut to Garry Moore asking Mrs. Armstrong: "And what would you say to your son if he became the first man on the moon?" That she loves him and to be careful, of course. In the Shadow of the Moon is full of such moments of discovery and homespun wisdom.
* The End Credits have the astronauts commenting on the conspiracy theories about staged moon landings in hangars. Cernan gets defensive-"Nobody is going to take those footsteps on the Moon away from me!" Charlie Duke's response is the best: "I can see faking it once, but why in the world would you do it NINE TIMES!!" ** The deceased Apollo astronauts are Pete Conrad (Apollo 12), Fred Haise and Jack Swigert (Apollo 13), Alan Shepard (Apollo 14), and Jim Irwin (Apollo 15).
