Apollo 11, the movie

After one of those frustrating extremely limited screenings, which I missed, Apollo 11 is out on disc, and brother is it worth it.

The movie consists of seldom-seen archive footage covering the flight, which has been beautifully restored.  Narration is loosely strung together, with newscasters of the time (frequently here Walter Cronkite, but there are a number of others) commenting on the then-live broadcasts, with some very minimal stick-figure computer animation of the spacecraft illustrating what is happening as the announcer explains.  There is a touch of synthesizer music added here and there over what would have otherwise been awkward silences, and generally it is unobtrusive.

There's no dramatization here.  A few speeches are read, a few canned statements are issued, all typical press-release stuff of the day.  The movie never digs into the private lives of the astronauts, for which I am grateful.  Better yet, it doesn't dip to just making crap up the way the writers on First Man did last year.  That is a relief.  No, it's about the flight, the overall mission, the hardware, and what we all saw in 1969.  Listening to the astronauts and mission control wrestle the LM to a safe landing, all while the fuel dwindles and the main computer sounds overload alarms (link), that is drama enough.  And honestly, drama doesn't get any better than that.

Dings... not many.  Some dubbed-in jet noise over a turboprop plane maneuvering was a little off-putting, that's one blooper.  In one key part, the synth soundtrack obscures some voices, briefly.  I'm having to dig around for more, but nothing else is coming to mind.  It's that good.

This is a limited movie, in that it aims to document the first moon landing and let the voices of the time tell us about it.  In many ways, it is a time capsule that allows us to go back to that sweaty summer and watch the action unfold.  It certainly conveys the feelings I remember of the time: excitement, a few minutes of bated breath here and there, the beauty of the hardware as well as the views from space, the relief of the astronauts' safe return, and the warm glow of national accomplishment.  While there is considerable 21st Century clean-up of the images, the sensibilities shown were pure best-of-the-late-1960s.  This movie sets out to simply show what happened and to let the people of the time speak for themselves, and it achieves these goals in all ways.

Four out of Four Stars.