Marking the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, CNN Films put together a 92 minute documentary from video shot on those days in July 1969. Some of the footage has of course been seen before but here was an opportunity to see a full clip in context. The film starts a few hours below launch. The astronauts are already suited up and the Walter Cronkite voice-over describes the scene. From then on we hear the voices over mission control and from characters on screen. We follow the astronauts chronologically to the launchpad, through the launch, out into space, landing on the moon, cavorting for 80 minutes and then returning home.
In the IMAX form some of the film is spectacular. For some of the lower resolution shots, the film creators put two simultaneous images side-by-side on the screen. In the case of the rendezvous maneuver, we could see both sides of the link. The film include a little bit of slice-of-life shots like 5¢ coffee and Johnny Carson in the crowd.
There were some truly amazing shots that I’d never seen before. There were different angles on events we’ve seen a thousand times. The mission control dialog is fully of dry humor said in such deadpan and mixed with jargon that you have to process what you heard. Just after a thunderous launch with the speed and altitude numbers spinning on the screen, the flight surgeon speaks the astronauts’ heart rates: Neil Armstrong: 105, Michael Collins: 99, Buzz Aldrin 88. This got a good laugh from the audience. By comparison, just after Neil touches down on the moon the flight surgeon called out that his heart rate was 157. It may have been a bit of a stressful situation. At another point in the film the flight surgeon was complaining that the leads on Buzz were no longer sending his respiration data. Buzz promised to notify NASA should he stop breathing.
Watching the initial decent down the latter in a more real-time, you could fell the apprehension about stepping into the regolith without knowing how deep it would let their boots sync. You can clearly see a safety line on Neil.
Once on the moon it was obvious that every minute of the excursion was carefully scripted and timed. The first duty was to collect a “contingency sample”. While not explicitly stated, this was a scoop of regolith that Neil put in his pocket so that if they had to bug out in an emergency, they would at least have that much. Other evidence of the scripted nature of the event was the careful planning and framing of the video shot to make sure that it included the LEM, flag and the astronauts. When you only have one shot, you better get it right the first time.
One of the most incredible shots was from Columbia flying overhead skimming the surface of the moon and looking at an oblique angle at the mountains and craters. It’s not a view you regularly get to see. This is where the IMAX presentation makes all the difference. If you have the opportunity to see it in a theater, I recommend that it be an IMAX theater. To be sure, this is a documentary. There is no narrative beyond the drama of the event itself. If you want to see a drama then I recommend “First Man” or the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon”. It is well worth the time invested to see this slice of history now preserved.
