Restored from sources including 11,000 hours of audio recordings and a huge cache of 70mm film that went overlooked for decades, it brought the event back vividly to those of us who were around for it - and for those who know it as a term in a history book.
(One of my kids had a high school "history" textbook that mentioned only "an expensive race to the moon" without the words Apollo, Armstrong, or Aldrin: someone should be able to sue textbook writers for stupidity. )
The found footage and the things that stitch it together (black and white newsreel type film, astronaut comments, the voice of Walter Cronkite) make a whole that is even more than the sum of its considerable parts. Many bits stand out as especially meaningful: The size of the Saturn V and its crawler. The suiting-up process, and how everyone was "all business" on the launch morning. The beautiful summer day with countless people gathered to watch. (Note: if you've only seen the launch in the film First Man, director Damien Chazelle thought an overcast launch was more dramatic. He was wrong.)
Finally, this film gives the viewer at least a small sense of how complex an endeavor this was, and how many thousand things had to go right - and almost all of them did.
The launch and the Cape looked the way I remembered (I was 9), but more vivid. The footage did not, I regret to say, note a tiny white Piper Cherokee ten miles or so away, from which vantage point my brother, and my dad, who had his private license and worked at Piper Aircraft down the coast in Vero Beach, watched. (Thank you, Dad.)
There are a few nitpicks, although none are material, so I'm not even going to touch on them here. The defining event of a generation is beautifully rendered and should not be overlooked. This was a time when the whole country, indeed most of the world, pulled for three men and the thousands of men and women behind them.
SEE THIS MOVIE.
This is what heroes look like: ordinary men of flesh and blood, with extraordinary skills and courage. (NASA)
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