Apollo 11 (new documentary): Seen it! SEE IT BY MARCH 7!

Thanks for the info. Yes, I know next weekend is the last. I already have my tickets! Thanks again! :slight_smile:

I saw this at the Science Museum in London - it was the IMAX First Steps edition. It was good, not great. The 70mm footage was awesome and it was nice to see the edges of the frame at last, but for practical reasons it’s mostly front-loaded - NASA obviously couldn’t take a 70mm camera with a film crew on board Eagle - which means that after the mission takes off the film turned into yet another collection of NASA footage with music.

The filmmakers also made use of restored audio from the CAPCOM transmissions, some of which was synced up to the cine footage shot by the astronauts, so it was really good NASA footage, but there’s only so many times you can experience the same raw material before it wears out. Perhaps it was just the First Steps version but the astronaut’s brief time on the moon was skipped over very quickly. My impression is that documentaries from long ago were heavy on diagrams and voiceovers, but from the 1980s onwards it became fashionable to have masses of talking heads, and in the modern age it’s trendy to have raw footage with no explanation. Perhaps in a decade or two someone will find a happy medium between those three extremes.

The use of “Mother Country” at the end was cringe-making. I could feel the cinema collectively wince. I imagine that even Americans must have felt that it was a OTT; that kind of wholly unironic jingoism felt out of place with the rest of the film. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the song itself had been any good. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to place us in the moment, but it felt fake, as if they were just trying to get people to leave the cinema with a spring in their step.

Anything else? It’s worth pointing out some of the same footage was restored for In the Shadow of the Moon in 2007. It was originally shot for a documentary called Moonshot One, which is available to watch for free here on account it being in the public domain:
https://is.nisd.us/apps/video/watch.jsp?v=77742

Flicking through it I noticed that the graphics for Apollo 11 were based directly on the animations in Moonshot One - they use the same “Lunar Lander / Asteroids” style and have the same basic composition. The music was made with period-correct modular synthesisers - there’s some footage of the composer noodling with a Moog modular here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NFpt1rz0xs

Format-wise the Science Museum has an IMAX film projector (I saw Dunkirk, The Force Awakens, and 2001 there in 70mm) but the Science Museum’s website says nothing about the format, so I assume it was a digital projection. It’s on until September.