Let's have a look at The Moonwalkers, but
there's something that's bugging me. "Shoot the glass". For some reason I kept
thinking of that line. I spent the whole day thinking about it. "Shoot the
glass". It's from Die Hard. Perhaps because we're coming up to
Christmas. Do you remember Thirtysomething? Imagine the cast of
Thirtysomething being shot and blown up by suave European
criminals. That's why Die Hard is so awesome. One of the reasons. 1987.
Nineteen-eighty-seven. Dawn of the modern age.
"Shoot... the glass". I think it's the way Alan Rickman carefully pronounces
the word "shoot". And the tone, as if he was scolding a particularly dim
child. Which is funny, because the other guy in that scene is blonde
man-mountain Alexander Godunov, whose character really does come across
as an overgrown boy in the rest of the film.
This is not the place to wonder why Hans delivered the line in English.
Suffice it to say that Alan Rickman knocked it out of the park. Who was the baddy in Die Hard 2? Colonel something. And there was
another baddie, Major something, who ended up sucked into a plane engine. I
can't even remember their names. Stewart? Stuart? Major... no. They were just
action men, they didn't have style. They didn't wear John Phillips suits or
sport modern goatee beards.
In the series' defence Jeremy Irons was pretty good in
Die Hard 3 - the last, to date, of the Die Hard films
- but only pretty good. See, Hans Gruber had a kind of operatic passion. He
was a drama queen. Rickman's take on the character was very showy, very
theatrical, presumably because he was a stage actor, used to broad strokes.
But that's why he was great.
I believe that Die Hard would easily work as an opera. The
material writes itself. Sadly Alan Rickman himself can never reprise the role,
because 2016. What a year that was.
Look at these people writing about 2016, on 06 December of that year, safe in the knowledge that death was over for that
year.
Solveig Dommartin is in space
But death is never over. It's important not to say "shoot the glass" out loud.
Not in the street or on a train. There is a whole universe inside your head, a
private universe separated from the outside world by a loading pause. You must
never allow one universe to leak accidentally into another.
Never allow that and today we're going to have a look at
The Moonwalkers, an audio-visual experience
held at a new venue in London called The Lightroom. It reminded me a bit of
Volume, the all-around projection screen that allows Netflix et al to
churn out good-looking shows on a tiny budget, or that globe thing in Las
Vegas, but on a smaller scale.
That globe thing. Which is called The Sphere, that's it. In Paradise, Las
Vegas. They were going to build one in London as well, but a bunch of
small-minded locals complained that it would ruin their sleep. I have the
impression that no-one liked the idea at first, but after The Sphere finally
opened (it was delayed by COVID) people started to warm to it, because
it was actually pretty sweet. Too sweet for London though.
The Lightroom isn't nearly as striking. In photographs it looks a bit naff:
The space-space
There's no ceiling, and the rest of the venue resembles the back half of a
sports hall, all exposed pipes and concrete and twisty corridors. The whole
thing has a slightly ad-hoc, prefab air, but perhaps it actually is
prefabricated. It's not bad, as such, but my snap impression is that the space
needed to be ten feet wider in all directions to be truly jaw-dropping, and it
needed to be dimmer, to hide the seams.
It is however a lot more impressive in motion. The Moonwalkers is
a fifty-minute dash through NASA's Apollo moon landing programme, narrated by
Tom Hanks, international treasure. It's also an advert for NASA's
Artemis project, which is essentially Apollo times two. There are
interviews with NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and as they
talked about their inspirations I wondered what would happen if either of them
were found to have cheated at cards or NASA decided to scale back
Artemis or cancel it. I assume the editors of
The Moonwalkers would have to bring Tom Hanks back to do some more
narration.
The Moonwalkers is also yet another go at remastering and
repackaging the enormous wealth of high-def media that NASA generated in the
1960s. I still have fond memories of seeing Michael Light's
Full Moon remastering project
at the Hayward Gallery back in 1999. Back then NASA only had PhotoShop 5 - not CS5, I mean PhotoShop 5 - so they
had to edit out all the fiducial markers by hand, without to aid of AI, but they managed.
I don't want to sound cynical about the periodic rehashing of NASA
assets. Full Moon was almost a quarter of a century ago.
That's longer than most people on the internet have been alive. It makes
perfect sense that someone else would have a go.
Some of the footage also popped up in the Apollo 11 documentary
that did the rounds a while back. It was filmed by a chap called Theo Kamecke for his own movie,
Moonwalk One, and because he used 65mm Todd-AO cameras the footage is
still stunning. Mad respect to whoever dug out those film cans.
The Moonwalkers is a fairly short documentary. It begins with a
big chunk of John F Kennedy's "we choose to go the moon" speech, emphasising
the great speed with which humanity progressed from hitting each other with
repurposed bones to inventing the jet engine, then progressing more or less
directly to Apollo 11. With a short hop and skip we see Neil, Buzz, and Mike
board their Saturn V, and then they're off. The earlier Apollo missions aren't
featured at all beyond the classic staging separation footage from one of the
uncrewed flights. There's no Apollo 8 going around the moon, or Apollo 10
doing its dress rehearsal, or the one where Wally Schirra got really annoyed
with ground control and told them to knock it off.
Then we learn a bit about Artemis, and then there's a surprisingly
lengthy section on the moon buggy, and then we come home. It ends abruptly
with a capsule plopping into the sea. There's no final flourish,
it just ends.
Is it any good? Mostly yes, although it works better as a long music video
with narration rather than a documentary. Like For All Mankind,
but more concise. The script has a lot of the typical "we gaze with wonder at
the moon because curiosity is a human imperative" stuff without feeling
completely glurgy, and Tom Hanks is of course good value. The soundtrack,
written by Anne Nitikin and performed by the Royal Philharmonic, lifts it up a notch. In a neat touch the moon buggy sequence segues into a
pastiche of Pink Floyd, or at least that's what it seemed like.
One sequence that stood out was a simple orbit around the Earth
while space hippie Rusty Schweickart talked about something that I completely ignored
because I was engrossed in the music. Another thing that grabbed me was an
attempt to give the moon some scale with deft CGI. The
moon has no air, so photographs look oddly flat. The craters we see look like
bumps, when in fact they're as deep as a skyscraper; the rolling terrain looks
like nearby hills, when in fact they are distant mountains.
For the most part the lightroom aspect is fairly conservative. The action
generally takes place on the main screen, dead ahead; occasionally the show
mixes things up and projects the main event onto the left screen. Curiously
never the right. The right wall, rear, and occasionally floor are used in the
manner of a fighter jet's multi-function displays, e.g. the extra information
is interesting but not essential. As mentioned the ceiling is just a big hole,
which feels like a missed opportunity, especially for something that takes
place in space.
It reminded me a lot of those multi-screen experiments from the 1960s, such as
A Place to Stand, or indeed the rest of the 1967 Canadian Expo. The Moonwalkers is actually less advanced than e.g. "Canada 67". It gave me a renewed respect for the poor sods who had to edit and composite
together all those film clips without computer assistance.
Now, as a spectacle The Moonwalkers works, but I learned more
or less nothing about Apollo, and it's a shame there wasn't a conventional
this-is-how-they-did-it aspect. It's also very impersonal. The only people
we learn anything about are the Artemis astronauts and Tom Hanks. There's
a roll-call of fallen astronauts, but they are ghosts.
"The Earth was without form"? No. "Houston, we've had a problem"? No.
Apollo 13 is covered as part of a list of Apollo missions, with a
caption merely noting that the landing was aborted. Given that Tom Hanks
actually participated in the Apollo 13 mission this may have been done to
avoid a temporal singularity. I don't want to sound
as if I'm lambasting the thing, but it could easily have been longer.
Hovering over it is the issue of cost. Tickets start at £25, but the
pricing is dynamic and actually seems to hover around £27-30. That's two good
films in a regular cinema or a trip on the Millennium Wheel or a single piece of
medium cod. It's more than it costs to see a film at the BFI IMAX, for example. If the
lightroom itself had been a mind-blowing, once-in-a-lifetime experience
£25 wouldn't be so bad, but the venue is smaller and less impressive in the flesh
than it appears in the publicity materials. For £12.50 I would rave about it, for a quarter of a hundred pounds not so much. There's a bar
upstairs, and a shop downstairs with books etc, although it's too small to
work very well (the guests queue up for the auditorium in the shop, so
there's no space to actually stand there and do any shopping).
For the record The Moonwalkers is on at The Lightroom, London,
until 21 April 2024. I have no idea what will happen after that. The film would probably work just as well as a flat projection on an IMAX
screen, in which case it would still be worth it for the soundtrack, which is not, as far as I can
tell, available separately.
