Apollo 11

Apollo 11

“Apollo 11” is unique among documentaries about the first moon mission, in that it’s also unlike most other movies, period. It is grand and distinctive; an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill.

Directed and edited by Todd Douglas Miller, “Apollo 11” tells its remarkable story entirely in the present tense. There are no historian interviews or vintage news clips here a few familiar faces turn up onscreen, but they’re portrayed as observers rather than authorities. And though Miller had access to a trove of previously unseen archival footage (all captured in 65mm) and worked with NASA to sync up some astonishingly crisp large-format audio recordings from Mission Control (the syncing itself was apparently a nightmarish process), this is not a history lesson per se. It’s more like a visceral tone poem; conceived less in the spirit of a conventional documentary or even a “making of” film than as a classic psychedelic sound and light show along the lines of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Woodstock,” “Apocalypse Now” or any iteration of “Koyaanisqatsi.”

Simple line-drawn animations explain what the various spacecraft are going to do it’s like watching diagrams come alive, similar in spirit if not execution to those computer graphics explaining wormholes and tesseracts from “2001.” Walter Cronkite is heard but not seen; his voice carries no more dramatic weight than those of all the other NASA announcers, supervisors and technicians speaking into headsets.

The movie favors unbroken images during its most thrilling moments: liftoff, landing, departure from lunar surface, descent through Earth’s atmosphere often taken from fixed vantage points (such as the shot through a capsule window during re-entry that shows flames roasting the spacecraft’s heat shield). The editing is intuitive; fond of grand gestures; often playful. I can only imagine how well it will play, for example, at the Museum of Science and Industry’s five story Omnimax theater.

And here we need to note the shape of the image. It’s 2:1, twice as wide as it is tall: the dimensions of a science fiction epic, a biblical spectacular, a Western adventure or one of those long “roadshow” movies that used to play in theaters around the time that NASA was preparing to send Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.

This choice was prompted by some of the rarest and most impressive new material unearthed for this project: 65mm motion picture film that was shot for an ultimately abandoned theatrical documentary on Apollo 11. These images have extraordinary clarity and density; their vivid cool colors will be catnip to buffs who grew up watching science fiction classics circa 1969 on giant curved screens.

But they’re not just special because they’re so crisp and big and period-specific. They’re special because when it became clear that the documentary had fallen apart as a commercial release after nearly four years in production NASA took over, essentially said “Here,” pointed its cameras at various technicians and construction crews (not exclusively but primarily) on-site during prelaunch assembly, testing, etc., then aimed them at spectators lining causeways and beaches throughout Florida Space Coast (including a large group of people gathered on Johnson Street outside Cocoanut Grove nightclub near Cape Canaveral), capturing all sorts of mundane but crucial context around these astronauts’ feats: shots of launch pad being wheeled into position atop gigantic platform with caterpillar wheels; men in hardhats climbing scaffolding hundreds of feet in air; spectators (including parents with children) setting up folding chairs in nearby department store parking lot to watch history being made; etc., etc., etc. All the stuff schoolbooks leave out.

When the story of “Apollo 11” moves into mission control, it often splits the screen a la “Woodstock,” or any number of ’70s concert docs. This lets us follow multiple lines of action happening at once in different locations technicians working consoles on opposite ends of the control room; astronauts on the lunar surface taking a phone call from then-President Richard Nixon while NASA watches them talk on a TV screen in Houston.

The film also uses split-screens to show us both the orbiter and the lander at the same time, either separating or reuniting; there’s a joyous music montage that splits the image into 10 panels, each showcasing groups of NASA employees, like a mosaic embodying the group effort it took to pull off this magic trick.

The rock concert vibe is helped along by Matt Morton’s pulsing electronic score, which is based around an analog-era Moog synthesizer like in albums by The Beatles, The Who and Stevie Wonder and film scores like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Tron.”

A title card at the end informs us that Morton’s score was created using only instruments that existed back in 1969; this strikes me as both super-nerdy and completely unnecessary because (a) his work sounds much more like Vangelis and Tangerine Dream scores for 1980s movies than anything from Neil Armstrong’s era; (b) it often suggests what kind of score you’d expect to hear in a high-tech crime thriller where robbers are cutting their way through a safe with blowtorches; but most importantly (c) who cares as long as it’s awesome, which this score totally is.

But that last part is glorious too, because it underlines how thoroughly imagined every single aspect of this production is even down to what seems like irrelevant technical notes. Movies this fully realized and ecstatically imagined are so rare that when they come along, they make most other films, even the good ones, seem underachieving.

Any information you happen to absorb during “Apollo 11” is secondary to the experience of looking at it and listening to it. This is the kind of movie you feel in your marrow, and which might come back to you as body memory later when you’re lying in bed at night after a long day at the beach, smelling salt water in your nostrils and feeling waves rise and fall in your legs and back.

Toward the end of the film, after Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins have gone there and come back again, we see a shot of the control tower on an aircraft carrier that was sent to retrieve the capsule after splashdown. The moon hangs in the evening sky behind it; small pale dish in frame. We feel differently about it having been there. But it has lost none of its majesty because we understand what it took to visit.

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