Day Five - Tuesday, August 28

In the Shadow of the Moon. Director: David Sington (this is his first feature documentary). United States (2007) 100 min English.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0925248/
For anyone who followed the Apollo space program and the moon landings, or who is interested in spaceflight, this is a must see. The director gathered all of the surviving astronauts of the program (they’re all in their late 70’s or 80’s) that he could and let them talk in their own words. This candid, moving, and often funny testimony is coupled with stunning remastered archival NASA film footage, much of it never shown before. In all, nine flights went to the moon, and the men who went are still the only humans to have traveled to an alien world. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, did, of course, not participate, as he’s been reclusive about his role for decades. But there is a lot of meaty interviews here, with Michael Collins being particularly eloquent (he was command module pilot of Apollo 11, the only member who didn’t get to land on the moon during that first historic flight). Other standouts from among the nine out of 26 astronauts who went to the moon in the film (with 25 surviving), are Buzz Aldrin (second to walk on the moon), Jim Lovell (command module pilot of Apollo 8, and more famously the commander of Apollo 13), and Alan Bean (click the links if you never learned or don’t remember the significance of the various flights).

Like a lot of people all over the world at that time, I was enthralled with the space program – I scrapbooked every article out of my dad’s Time magazines and New York newspapers that he read daily. I had the model spacecraft, the books, even the G.I. Joe Mercury Astronaut and capsule, complete with a 45rpm record of John Glenn’s audio recording during his flight. So this film was a particular joy, to revisit these men, all very human, despite their amazing exploits that elevated them to national and international heroes. They’re all from the older school of astronauts, having the Right Stuff. And indeed, listening to them talk about how very on the bleeding edge all of the technology was then, all of the unknowns, and risks they were taking, fully cognizant of the odds of making it back alive, brought back the sense of wonder and amazement that I had as an eight-year old boy. What started truthfully as a political race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., in the end became, for a brief time, something a good portion of the world looked up at as a noble adventure.