Off to the cinema to see Apollo 11: First Steps Edition, an edited-for-IMAX version of Apollo 11, a documentary about the Apollo 11 lunar mission of 1969. The full-length film came out earlier in the year and attracted rave reviews, but here in the UK it only had a limited cinema release. I missed it, but luckily the Science Museum is showing the IMAX version, so I saw that instead.
NASA's goal with the Apollo project was to land two people on the moon and return them safely to Earth, preferably by the end of the 1960s. Now, I don't want to spoil the film, but despite many perils - suffocation, mechanical failure, radiation, extreme heat and cold, the risk of a catastrophic explosion, space viruses, the ever-present threat that Richard Nixon might stow away inside the capsule - I can reveal that NASA knocked it out of the park.
The next time the psychologist tells me that I'm being childish I will show her this document which proves that I am an ADULT because it says so right there.
I saw the film at the IMAX theatre in The Science Museum, London. The original cut is 93 minutes long, but for IMAX screenings a special version has been created that condenses the film down to 45 minutes. Why? I have no idea. With adverts it comes to a neat hour, which perhaps fits the schedules of museums; or maybe the sound mixing or cropping was really hard, I don't know. I also don't know what was cut from the full version. First Steps generally skips over the voyages to and from the moon, and the moonwalk itself doesn't take very long, so perhaps that's where most of the editing happened.
The Science Museum preceded the film with adverts for Amazon Alexa, Dacia, Sky Movies, Land Rover, and Pokemon collector's cards. This is the world in which we're living in.
The film has an interesting genesis. Back in 1969 a chap called Theo Kamecke was asked by NASA to shoot a feature-length documentary on the Apollo project. He used a mixture of 65mm Todd-AO film cameras and standard 35mm. The result was Moonwalk One, which had a short cinema release in 1972 and fell into obscurity afterwards. A low-resolution version is available here, on the website of a school in the United States.
Apollo 11 is essentially a streamlined remake of Moonwalk One, minus the narration. It uses the same basic 65mm raw footage, and even has some of the same shots. The CGI is designed to look like Moonwalk One's cel animations. The footage is often spectacular and the restoration is incredible, but knowing that it was shot years before by someone else lessens Apollo 11's impact somewhat; it's not so much one man's vision as a construction, rather like the Apollo project itself. If nothing else it's a good advertisement for 65mm film.
Moonwalk One vs Apollo 11
Moonwalk One used a mixture of source footage, including TV images and animations. The film-makers decided to print the film on 35mm with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Time hasn't been kind to it. In this series of images Apollo 11 is at the top, the same shots in Moonwalk One are at the bottom from a poor-quality TV transfer.
Note how the new animation for Apollo 11 is designed to look like the animation for Moonwalk One; this sequence in particular was more or less identical.
In both cases the film-makers seem to have based their animations on the displays in mission control, as per the following shot from Apollo 11.
The film's music is however all-new. Composer Matt Morton used equipment that was available in 1969, including this huge Moog Modular:
The end result sounds like a modern interpretation of the mid-1970s "Berlin School" of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze.
On a visual level the restored footage looks awesome on an IMAX screen. The opening scenes of NASA's crawler transporter ferrying the giant Saturn V rocket to the pad are stunning, as is an extended tracking shot of the rocket powering into a beautiful blue sky.
It reminded me a little of the 1989 documentary For All Mankind, which was an overview of Apollo set to a shimmering ambient soundtrack by Brian Eno. For All Mankind was conceived as a non-narrative film with music and visuals only, but the end result had interview voiceovers; Apollo 11 on the other hand is made entirely of contemporary footage, with audio from news reports and Mission Control's conversations with the Apollo capsule. The music is mostly low-key and there are no talking heads.
The crew of Apollo 11 had a businesslike relationship, with Neil Armstrong in particular being famously reticent, and perhaps as a consequence the film didn't grab me on an emotional level. It was at times tense and awe-inspiring, but I can't say I felt anything. The triumphant ending, with numerous shots of the Stars and Stripes set to the tune of "Mother Country" by John Stewart, probably meant more to viewers in the United States. It felt out-of-place in a film that's otherwise emotionally restrained.
Apollo 11 has some 1960s-style split screen effects - in the sequence at the top Mission Control staff give their OK for landing.
Beyond that my only major criticism is that the film tails off when the 65mm footage runs out. The extensive shots of the launch preparation are mesmerising, and our introduction to the crew is clever - their lives are summarised with a series of efficient montages - but as the film goes on the direction becomes increasingly literal, until by the end it feels like a very good television documentary.
It's not a great film and won't be remembered in the same way people remember Grey Gardens or Man on Wire or Grizzly Man and so forth, but there's nothing obviously wrong with it and it passes the time.
In contrast to the formal environment of Apollo 11, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean of Apollo 12 sound like two friends at a sports match.
Problems? Despite the audio restoration the narration is at times hard to follow, and on the IMAX screen the subtitles that pop up when people first appear are too subtle to register. There were no 65mm cameras in space, so post-launch the filmmakers had to rely on grainy 16mm footage shot by the astronauts. On an IMAX screen the grain is enormous and looks like tapioca. The lunar excursion itself is illustrated mostly with still images taken by the astronauts with their Hasselblads. Neither of those two last points were really problems, they're just an inevitable consequence of NASA's understandable decision to prioritise science and sample return over carrying a 65mm film camera into space plus an operator and batteries and thousands of feet of film.
I learn from the internet that NASA originally wanted the director of Moonwalk One to recreate Aldrin and Armstrong's lunar walkabout on a soundstage! No, that's not a joke. They actually wanted the director to redo it so that it would look good. Imagine if they had gone ahead with it. There would be no end of conspiracy theories.
Richard Nixon spoke to the astronauts while they were on the moon, using up some of their precious time, but in Apollo 11 he only appears for a split-second; John F Kennedy has more screen time, and gets to deliver the coda. Take that, Richard Nixon.
For the record, Apollo 12 followed four months later, and again landed two people on the moon and returned them safely to Earth, also before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 13 followed after another four months, but an explosion on the way to the moon wrecked the service module; after an agonisingly tense trip around the moon the crew returned to a hero's welcome, having survived incredible odds. NASA tentatively planned seven more manned missions to the moon, but the last three were cancelled in 1970, with Apollo 17 bringing the lunar aspect of Apollo to a close in 1972.
At that point the remaining Apollo hardware was used for the Skylab space station, and also the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous of 1975. From 1975 onwards there was a long gap in the United States' manned space programme until the flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981.
And working backwards, Apollo 10 was a test flight that went to the moon with an overweight lunar module that couldn't land and take off again; Apollo 9 was a test of the same hardware but in Earth orbit; Apollo 8 flew around the moon with just the command module; Apollo 7 was a gruelling long-duration test of the command module in Earth orbit; the earlier Apollo missions were flown without a crew. The only astronaut fatalities in the programme were caused by a fire during a ground test in what would retrospectively become Apollo 1.
I was born in the Skylab era and grew up with the Space Shuttle. As a kid I was aware of Apollo, but it belonged to a different age. People in the 1960s were naive and full of drugs. They imagined that aliens from space would come to Earth and enlighten us, but that didn't happen. Instead their future was Watergate, inflation, successive oil crises, The Limits to Growth, endless double albums by Chicago, and of course the unglamorous space travel of Alien and cyberpunk and Red Dwarf etc.
The next logical step after the moon was a mission to Mars, but Mars is a lot more difficult than the moon. It has more gravity than the moon and an atmosphere, so landing on it and surviving is harder. The economics are such that a simple there-and-back flight would be enormously inefficient, but conversely a lengthy stay would cost a fortune, and for what?
So, when I was a kid, I understood that we would all have to settle for less.
