Friday September 7, 11:47 AM
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The really surprising thing is that no one has made this film before.
Thank goodness someone finally did, for the dozen men it celebrates -- the only human beings to have stood on an alien world -- won't be with us forever. "In the Shadow of the Moon" unites 10 of the 12 astronauts who flew on nine Apollo missions and descended to the Moon between 1968 and 1972 along with remastered archival footage from NASA, much never seen before. The value of this film, not just to moviegoers today but to future generations, is simply enormous.
Documentaries these days tend toward doom and gloom so "Moon" is a welcome relief. The movie is about a glorious moment in U.S. history.
Director David Sington achieves a rising sense of tension despite the fact that every viewer knows the outcome. He has superbly mixed astute interviews with the men who rode those rockets to glory with space footage that in many instances is jaw dropping. From reams of footage, he has selected meaningful shots of the men in those tiny capsules and footage of the spacecraft doing its Herculean tasks. And by synching 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control with 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers' voices, he has the viewer inside the beating, earthly heart to the mission. |
