The Last Man on the Moon

This inspir­ing doc­u­men­tary focus­es on Eugene Cer­nan, the last astro­naut to walk on the moon. Now in his eight­ies, he reflects on the events that took him way up there in 1972 and how they were to have a pro­found influ­ence on his life back home. He recounts his steps, from the lead-up to Apol­lo 17’s lift-off to those on the lunar sur­face, offer­ing a sen­ti­men­tal insight into his grand adventure.

The film relays an immer­sive expe­ri­ence of Cernan’s phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al jour­ney by using archive film shots from his space voy­ages which neat­ly slots into footage from the present day where Cer­nan vis­its his space­craft and the locales of yore. These flash­backs help cap­ture the dif­fi­cul­ties of car­ry­ing the bur­den of fad­ed glo­ry in the face of old age. Though sur­round­ed by fam­i­ly and friends, he is pre­sent­ed as a man who alien­ates him­self from oth­er peo­ple, and despite claim­ing that he doesn’t ​“go round liv­ing in the past”, he seems to still be hid­ing from its reality.

Direc­tor Mark Craig con­trasts pop music from the ​’60s to show the upbeat, adven­tur­ous mood of Cernan’s young life, with the slow, reflec­tive coun­try music of his old age. He is depict­ed as the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the Amer­i­can Dream dur­ing the country’s space age, paint­ed as the a hero and emblem­at­ic of NASA’s remark­able suc­cess sto­ry in its com­pe­ti­tion with the USSR for space explo­ration (which end­ed with Cernan’s moon land­ing in 1972).

The motifs of Amer­i­can suc­cess help to embed Cernan’s mes­sage to nev­er ​“short change your­self” into the film. Craig man­ages to por­tray this beau­ti­ful­ly through­out, via the manip­u­la­tion of music and nos­tal­gic back­drops. While the footage is stun­ning, often com­ple­ment­ed with an epic clas­si­cal score, the film does fail to offer enough com­ment on the absur­di­ty of being away from Earth. Craig flirts too much with the idea of Cer­nan as the hero­ic space explor­er. Nonethe­less, his attempt to human­ise him is suc­cess­ful by the end – Cer­nan is seen as a flawed but like­able man.