In the Shadow of the Moon

[migrated from myspace blog]

There are three "events" (that word isn't nearly large enough to contain them) of the 20th century that I find interesting enough to justify reading entire books on them. The Wright Brothers, World War II, and the Apollo program. We are lucky enough to have a movie theater here that specializes in films that the brand-name cinema chains won't carry. Although there are still movies that never make it to any theater in this part of the country...or at least state, this particular one has shown a couple of must-see films lately. Once and In the Shadow of the Moon.

I got to see the latter film on Thursday and it's easily better than anything showing at the cineplex right now. The story of the Apollo program is told in the words of those who are most passionate about it, the men who lived, worked, ate, slept, and even drove (or as Buzz Aldrin claims, was the first to urinate) on the moon for three days of their lives.

The film is a combination of historical footage, from the Apollo program and earlier, and new interviews with some of the 24 men to have orbited the moon (12 walked on the surface, of which 10 survive). For anyone who hasn't read a few books on the topic (and wasn't around to live through it), this is the movie to see if you want to know how things really were when, as the tagline says, "The whole world looked up." With only 100 minutes to tell the story of 9 flights to the moon, and how we got to that point, there's never a dull moment. These were men on a mission, but the awesomeness of what they did was not lost on them. Even 38 years after the fact, Alan Bean continues to try to convey what it was like to go the moon through his art, my favorite of which is this:

All the footage is real, nothing recreated digitally. Sitting there watching the gigantic Atlas V rocket lift off in slow motion, even in a modest sized theater, if it doesn't bring a lump to your throat with an appreciation of watching history, you may want to check your pulse. These people put men on the moon with less computing power than I have sitting next to my left foot. Apollo 11 even overloaded the memory available in the lunar lander. All the biggest moments from the time are there, Walter Cronkite, Neil Armstrong, Apollo 13. (For some of the best Apollo stories, though, a different source will be necessary. Either the book A Man on the Moon or the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon is a good start. For example, what did the 3rd man on the moon, Pete Conrad say as he stepped off the ladder? "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me.")

As one of the astronauts put it, "One day we were test pilots. The next we were American heroes...and we hadn't even done anything yet." As far as I can tell, that's the last time we really had such as a thing as an American hero at all (except maybe Batman ). No more ticker tape parades, or a million people in East central Florida trying to find a place to watch history happen. In the Shadow the Moon is a chronicle of another era, and I look forward to see the DVD on my shelf next to From the Earth the Moon, For All Mankind, and Nova's To the Moon, and Apollo 13.