Apollo 11

If you’re a fan of movies (or if you’re not), you’ve probably seen a space movie. Maybe it was 1983’s comprehensive drama “The Right Stuff”. Perhaps you checked out Ron Howard’s gripping 1993 film “Apollo 13”. More likely, you’ve watched the eye-opening racial tale “Hidden Figures” in 2016, or last year’s visceral Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man”. But you’ve never seen a space movie quite like the new documentary “Apollo 11”.

Compiled from never-before-seen footage of the famed mission to the moon and directed (and edited) with precision by Todd Douglas Miller, the new film is as fresh as it is entertaining and flitting. It amounts to a swift runtime of 93 minutes, which flys by pretty fast, especially when witnessing such groundbreaking events as men going to the moon.

Yes, we know the story. But the new footage adds an immeasurable level of gravitas and wonder to the precedings because of the crystal clear imagery. The footage we see, which include brand-new shots of the various control rooms and people assembled on the beach to watch the flight, was partly shot in 70 millimeter, which looks like it could have been done today. It is quite frankly a miracle that the footage exists, and Miller treats it as such. Almost every single frame of the film looks like it was shot by a seasoned cinematographer, dripping with bright colors and glorious panoramas.

To complement the brilliant imagery, the filmmakers have selected clips of control room workers scrambling to land the spacecraft and the three astronauts, Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, chatting with each other aboard the craft. We never see the faces of those talking, but hear constant audio throughout, some of it hard to hear, but most of it revelatory.

The film’s sound doesn’t stop at archival audio recordings. Matt Morton composed an electronic, beating score that achieves its goal of ramping up the tension, even if it sometimes sacrifices the otherwise pristine quality of some of the scenes. A few other compositions to a good job of making the mission seem inspirational, and one particular montage set to the John Stewart song, “Mother Country”, is edited perfectly to the tune.

We find out at the end that the film was dedicated to the engineers, technicians, and other servicemen and women who helped build the machines that landed the men on the moon. Yet the film doesn’t make that clear throughout its runtime, and the most interesting bits of dialogue happen to be from the trio of infectiously joyful astronauts. The idea of its dedication is a noble one, but I just wish it had come through a bit stronger.

Aside from that one gripe, “Apollo 11” is a very different movie from your average space adventure. It doesn’t focus on the dark parts of the mission, on the cramped, harrowing inner sanctuary of the capsule. It ruminates in thrilling space travel and joyful characters, creating a very watchable movie that is at once involving and beautiful to behold.

{★★★☆}