Apol­lo 11

Fifty years on, what’s left to be said about the flight of Apol­lo 11? The eight-day mis­sion that ful­filled Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s eight-year-old pledge to place a man on the moon before the end of the decade is one of the most wide­ly doc­u­ment­ed events in human his­to­ry. We all have the fuzzy, black-and-white footage of Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar sur­face etched into our col­lec­tive mem­o­ries. We know their words by heart (“The eagle has landed…It’s one small step for man…”), and in 2018, Damien Chazelle recre­at­ed the jour­ney from Armstrong’s per­spec­tive in the metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed First Man.

So how can Todd Dou­glas Miller, the direc­tor of Apol­lo 11, offer us a new per­spec­tive? First of all, he has the ben­e­fit of using footage that we’ve nev­er seen before, thanks to the dis­cov­ery in 2017 of a wealth of mate­ri­als in the NASA archive, includ­ing more than 60 reels of 65mm film relat­ed to the Apol­lo 11 mis­sion. Miller is a smart enough film­mak­er to know that this footage is his trump card, so he gives it to us straight; no explana­to­ry voiceover, no talk­ing heads, just cap­ti­vat­ing images that remind us of the awe­some scale of this project.

When we first see the mag­nif­i­cent Sat­urn V, itself being car­ried into posi­tion on enor­mous cater­pil­lar tracks, it’s hard not be over­whelmed by the sheer size of it, and when this three-mil­lion-kilo rock­et is launched into the stars it seems like an impos­si­bil­i­ty, even as we watch it hap­pen in front of our eyes.

Apol­lo 11 achieves the feat of mak­ing us see these events as if we were watch­ing live footage, with no sense of how it was all going to play out. Miller’s skil­ful edit­ing of the footage gives the film a grip­ping sense of imme­di­a­cy and momen­tum. He occa­sion­al­ly uses onscreen graph­ics to rein­force our under­stand­ing of the mission’s progress and he employs split-screens at crit­i­cal junc­tures, but his most effec­tive tac­tic is a small counter that appears on screen when the astro­nauts are engag­ing in a par­tic­u­lar­ly tricky manœu­vre, like land­ing, dock­ing or re-entry. The falling num­bers tell us how much fuel they have to com­plete each action and how close they are to doing it and, in these moments, the film gen­er­ates and sus­tains a remark­able degree of tension.

But for all of the dra­ma sur­round­ing the flight itself, it’s the footage on ter­ra fir­ma that proves to be the most engag­ing and mov­ing. From the count­less NASA engi­neers and sci­en­tists calm­ly pro­cess­ing a tsuna­mi of data to ensure no detail is left unchecked, to the reporters and fam­i­lies gath­ered by the launch site in makeshift camps, their faces filled with excite­ment and won­der, their eyes all fixed upon the same dis­tant point in the sky.

When Pres­i­dent Nixon called the Apol­lo astro­nauts to con­grat­u­late them, he said, ​“For one price­less moment in the whole his­to­ry of man, all the peo­ple on this Earth are tru­ly one: one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safe­ly to Earth.” Apol­lo 11 is a chron­i­cle of a world unit­ed by a sin­gle col­lec­tive human endeav­our. Per­haps the rea­son we keep going back to this sto­ry is the knowl­edge that we’ll nev­er see the like of it again.