Space case

>> In the Shadow of the Moon is an out-of-this
world documentary on the Apollo program

by MARK SLUTSKY

“The men in this film remain the only living people to have seen the Earth from an alien world.” It’s got the ring of science fiction, but this sentence is pulled from a documentary, the new film In the Shadow of the Moon. The movie tells, in absorbing detail, the story of the American space program, and its Apollo program, which landed man on the moon. It’s all factual of course (unless you’re a conspiracy theorist), but when you learn about this stuff in detail, it seems almost too far-out to be real.

The film begins in 1961, when President Kennedy gave the famous speech in which he announced his goal of landing men on the moon before the decade was out. That NASA was able to do so, in just seven years, is still kind of mind-blowing, as they had to basically invent everything from scratch, and do it all with a staggering level of precision; in space, there’s a razor-thin margin for error.

Director David Sington tells the story simply, using interview and archival footage. Many of the surviving Apollo astronauts tell their stories, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Alan Bean among them. (Unsurprisingly, the reclusive and enigmatic Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon and voice behind, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” is not one of them.)

Most of the guys are still strapping, healthy-looking all-American types, and you can’t help but be reminded of how the space program was also an effective PR exercise for the Cold War. Still, these guys did seem to have the “right stuff,” as Tom Wolfe put it—most of the astronauts, former test pilots, were involved to the level of helping design the spacecraft themselves. Seeing the interviews with the astronauts today (shot mostly in craggy close-ups) juxtaposed, split-screen-style, with footage of their younger selves is bracing.

If you’re familiar with Wolfe’s book or the movie based on it, much of this story will be familiar to you, though the film’s single-minded focus on the moon program is not the exact same story. What’s really neat about In the Shadow of the Moon is the way the film takes you through the details of the first moon launch from conception, to countdown, to the tense moments where Armstrong couldn’t find a place to bring down the lander safely, burning precious fuel all the while.

The archival material the filmmakers dig up goes a long way towards drawing you in. The film, shot from inside the rockets themselves, is hypnotic and beautiful, especially the footage taken by automated cameras located inside the sections of the spacecraft, which fell away as it left the atmosphere. (The cameras tumbled back towards Earth and were caught by giant nets suspended from planes.) And in perhaps the movie’s most morbidly fascinating scene, we get to listen to the speech prepared for President Nixon in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin, for whatever reason, were unable to make it back to the lunar orbiter and left to die on the moon.

No one’s been back to the moon since 1972; whether the reasons are political, financial or scientific is not a debate the movie is interested in. Whatever you think of the space program, the sheer ingenuity and audacity of those years is something this movie brings home with force.

In the Shadow of the Moon
opens this Friday, Sept. 21

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