BEFORE: The good news is that the documentary chain is finally here! I've been talking about it and focused on it for the past few months, so therefore it felt like it took forever to get here, but it's here! Now in the past couple of years I've also done documentary chains, but they've had fairly narrow focuses on particular topics. I think the first one I did was all about art and artists, and then I did a whole "geek week" thing the following year, focused on comic-cons, fan films and the making of films like Star Wars, Ghostbusters and Back to the Future. Then last year, of course, was my super-long Rockumentary chain, which ended being almost two months long - but still represented a continuous linked chain, thanks to people like Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger who popped up in so many films.
This year the doc chain's going to be a little different, since I'm working on a perfect year, I strung together the best linked chain I could out of the docs I have access to, regardless of subject matter. Linking trumps thematic programming this year - though there are still going to be only a few general topics covered, like politics, sports, religion, global warming, technology and celebrities/comedians. It still may end up feeling like I'm bouncing around, but I think it will all make sense in the end.
Remember, I count appearances in archive footage the same way I count actor appearances - so if footage of Ronald Reagan or JFK can help link two films, I'm going to take advantage of that. That's why the "Mark Felt" movie was my lead-in, because it had archive footage of Richard Nixon, and also some newsmen who tend to appear in docs, like Dick Cavett, who was in so many rock docs last year. But it's Walter Cronkite who carries over from "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House".
Damn, if I'd known that his voice also appeared in "First Man" (that wasn't listed in the IMDB) then I could have switched the order of the previous two movies with Brian D'Arcy James" so "First Man" could be right next to "Apollo 11". Now I wish I'd thought of that.
THE PLOT: A look at the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon, led by commander Neil Armstrong and pilots Buzz Aldrin and Michael Colins.
AFTER: In my book, July 20, 1969 should be heralded as the day that the nerds started their takeover. It began with NASA's success in making rocketry cool - and then maybe 30 years later the people who crunch the numbers and maintain the stats took over sports, and then tech geeks like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos took over the tech market, and eventually the people who like comic books took over Hollywood. Now I can say with almost no irony that "the geek shall inherit the Earth". Seriously, name one field that isn't dominated now by the people who used to get bullied in school. OK, maybe stuff like mixed martial arts, NASCAR, power lifting, arm wrestling and smashing beer bottles over your head (yeah, that's a thing) - the nerdy people now control everything else, and it all started with putting two men on the moon.
Maybe at one time it was super-macho to be an astronaut, but for every guy in a spacesuit on the television like Armstrong or Aldrin who got championed as some kind of super-masculine idol, there were at least thirty guys in the control room with glasses, short hair and a pocket protector. You can see them sitting in rows in this film, back in the days when there was just one color for a men's shirt (white) and one color for a pair of pants (black slacks). They look like a clone army, each one saying "Go" when their station is called, and I don't know how many "Go's" it take to launch a rocket, but it's at least 20, probably more. It's like the pod people took over and made everyone dress the same because individuality is counter-effective to the hive mind.
But, as we saw in "Hidden Figures", which I just re-watched last weekend with my parents, so much of rocketry is just math. Figuring out when a rocket needs to go from an orbital trajectory back to a parabolic one, that's math. Figuring out when a rocket needs to do an additional burn and go from orbiting the Earth to reach escape velocity and head toward the moon, that's also math. Well, physics and math, but physics is really all just useful applied math, right? And that's what all those stages of the Mercury and Gemin-EYE programs were about, testing the math and putting it to use to do the next task, break the next threshold, and then finally in July of 1969 they put the "get a man in orbit" knowledge together with the "one space module docks with another" knowledge and added the "get the astronauts into the smallest part of the capsule and head back to earth" knowledge. Oh, yeah, and it would be great if the astronauts survived, because the various stages of rocket are disposable, but the human lives aren't. Can you imagine if the goal was to put a man on the moon, without yet figuring out how to get him home? That would be just kind of sad, but at least we'd have a new national hero/martyr.
Come to think of it, the end result of all the different space flights and tests looks a little bit like "our plan is to put three small chairs inside a slightly larger capsule, put that on top of an enormous BOMB, but one that will get the capsule into orbit, and then from there, they're going to set out through the endless void and try to hit the moon, which is akin to a grain of sand floating in the ocean. I don't know why I never saw it this way before, probably because I knew that the Apollo 11 crew succeeded (sorry, another SPOILER ALERT), so when you know the ending and that it all was accomplished, it's a bit hard to remember a time when landing on the moon wasn't a certainty. We all have to remember that nobody at NASA could have been 100% on this - they were all only about one or two steps away from making it up as they went along.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here, because I've got more important questions to ask. Like, the film starts with footage of NASA moving that giant launch platform containing the Apollo 11 rocket across Cape Canaveral. You know, that enormous thing on tank treads that looks like it weighs 100 tons, and it goes so slowly they have to start moving it into position about 2 weeks before the launch. I've always wondered, why didn't they just assemble the rocket closer to where they wanted to launch it from? See, I'm a problem solver, it turns out, and solving problems starts with asking questions like these. After all, it's not like we're talking about a bunch of rocket scien... oh, wait, never mind.
This film seems to be about 99% composed of NASA's footage from the time, which is great, but that also leads me to more questions - like, how does it all look so GOOD? There were different cameras used back in 1969, they didn't have the big fancy high-resolution digital cameras that were in use today. Footage from the moon landing that I've seen before has looked generally crappy, so what gives? How did they make the footage BETTER? Or was it always this good, and maybe people didn't have good enough HDTVs to view it, until now?
But at the same time, I'm also a little suspicious - I've been burned before by documentaries that say they were all made of real footage, only they weren't. Some of this looks a little TOO good, so that raises my suspicions about whether any shots here were faked. And as a point of order, you really shouldn't fake any footage where the moon landing is concerned, because that's been a point of contention in the past, some people believe that the whole THING didn't happen and was filmed in a studio. If word spreads that any of the footage in this film isn't 100% real, that's just going to open up Pandora's box of moon landing conspiracies all over again. So now it's time for me to do a little digging...
But until I find out more details, you can't really go wrong here by watching this film that really emphasizes the beauty of spaceflight, watching everything go right (except for those pesky data alerts during the final descent to the moon, I guess) and great news, the astronauts somehow made it back to Earth and all of them survived! But you probably knew that already...
(UPDATE: It seems like the footage of ground control was all done in 65mm Panavision, which is one reason why it all looks so good. In addition they recovered tons of 70mm footage from the Apollo 11 launch and recovery. A post-production house in NYC was then used to make hi-res digital scans of everything, including more conventional 35mm and 16mm films, plus still photos and closed-circuit TV, presumably from the spaceflight itself. So that's why this all looks so damn good...)
I paid $5.99 to watch this as a premium On Demand movie - I would prefer not to make a habit of that, because that's too costly, I can't afford that on a regular basis, in addition to what I'm already paying for premium cable. But once in a while is OK, I guess - that's cheaper than seeing it in the movie theater, although it probably would have looked even better in IMAX format. It was also available on iTunes for $5.99, but that would have been a rental for only 30 days, this way I can at least dub a copy to DVD and make it a double feature on a disc with "First Man" (also $5.99) Oh, and here's a tip, this film will be airing on CNN starting this Sunday, June 23. So you won't have to pay $5.99 to see it, like I did, if you've got basic cable with the news channels. I debated waiting until Sunday, but that would have ruined my schedule, I just can't fall behind again if I'm going to hit my July 4 movie on time.
Also starring (via archive footage) Neil Armstrong (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Deke Slayton, Jim Lovell, Charles Duke, Glynn Lunney, Bruce McCandless II, Clifford E. Charlesworth, Janet Armstrong, Richard Nixon (also carrying over from "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "First Man"), Jack Benny, Johnny Carson (last seen in "The Front Runner").
RATING: 6 out of 10 scientific experiments
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