Review: Apollo 11 gets the documentary it deserves

Director Todd Douglas Miller was thinking about doing an art movie for his next project. But first he had to wrap up a documentary about the last steps taken on the Moon , by the crew of Apollo 17.

At the urging of some archivists he’d worked with, particularly Stephen Slater, who owns the largest collection of Apollo video and audio recordings outside of NASA, Miller turned his attention to Apollo 11. The clincher was a call from Dan Rooney, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, who alerted Miller to an uncataloged cache of 65 mm film and 11 000 hours of audio recordings. “The film quality was so good, we didn’t have to do much to it,” says Miller.

The end result , which took nearly three years to make, will have viewers reevaluating how they think about and, if they’re of a certain age, remember, the Apollo landings. What makes it even more impressive is the lack of narration—the voices inside mission control in July 1969 describe what is happening or is about to happen, giving viewers the sense they are listening to a live broadcast. “What started out as a simple editing exercise—could we tell the entire story of the mission using only archival materials?—turned into a cooperative effort by an international team of experts to create the definitive work on Apollo 11 for the screen,” Miller says. The film opens today in IMAX theaters nationwide.

Along with restoring the 65 mm footage, which isn’t far off from the modern standard 70 mm film print size, Miller and his team had to make sense of hundreds of hours of film. The National Archives didn’t actually know what was on its 165 Panavision reels of Apollo mission tape. It turned out that at least 61 of them could be traced directly to Apollo 11. Never-before-seen shots captured the astronauts getting ready in their spacesuits before launch, the 500 men and one woman—JoAnn Morgan —of mission control, crowds near the launch site, and the recovery and 18-day quarantine of the astronauts when they returned to Earth.

Another challenge was that almost none of the footage from NASA contained any synchronized sound. The audio from mission control was originally captured by two custom 30-track recorders in Houston, Texas. Slater was brought in to help match the sound to the images. “In some cases we looked at the clocks on the wall of mission control so we could figure out where to match the audio to the film,” he says. Surviving members of the mission control team, along with Apollo 11 astronauts Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, consulted to help the filmmakers understand what they were seeing and hearing.

For the most part, the restored footage looks and sounds stunning in an IMAX theater. The only distraction is the obvious graininess of the 16 mm footage from inside the capsule. To compensate, Miller often splits the screen to show two or more shots filmed at different places simultaneously. The clever trick not only improves the image resolution, but also allows viewers to watch the reactions of mission control and astronauts more or less in real time.

The movie opens with footage of the crawler, a massive, tank-like machine that carries the Saturn V rocket to the Cape Kennedy launch tower from the Vehicle Assembly Building. The engineers walking alongside serve as a useful reminder of just how large the rocket was, and how tiny the crew capsule at the top of it. Neil Armstrong’s son Rick, who attended a recent screening in Washington, DC, said the sound of the Saturn V at launch in the film comes the closest of any recording to reproducing what he heard as a 12-year-old in 1969.

At key points in the mission, such as the launch, the Moon landing, and reentry, the film plays out in real time, giving the audience the sense of immediacy that made it such a gripping experience for those who were watching live. With no narrator or talking heads to set the tone, it’s left to the music, particularly background music, to convey awe, tension, and beauty. In one particularly touching moment, as the crew is heading back Earthward, Aldrin says, “Let’s get some music.” “Mother Country” by John Stewart starts playing softly on a portable tape recorder. As the recorder flips end-over-end inside the zero-gravity cabin, a louder, clearer version of the song starts playing. It’s a neatly done trick.

As close as the film gets to a complete and authentic re-creation of the flight, some of the shots are not from Apollo 11. The separation of the Saturn V rocket’s three stages is from an earlier, crewless Apollo flight. The shot of the Sun’s corona emerging from behind the disc of the Moon is from Apollo 12, although it was repositioned to approximate what the Apollo 11 crew saw.

Beyond the new footage, space buffs have plenty of visuals to salivate over. During maneuvers such as escaping Earth’s orbit and entering the Moon’s, Miller shows the speed of the craft on the screen, allowing intrepid viewers to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations of engine thrust. Computer animations, based on the designs used from the 1960s, diagram how the spacecraft traveled on its journey.

One subtle inclusion in the movie was inspired by an off-the-cuff remark by Collins to Miller that the crew was “broadside to the Sun.” It took a month of digging around the original specs from mission control, Miller says, until his team learned that the spacecraft had been “on its x-axis pointed celestial north and spinning like a top.” That repositioning and spinning prevented the crew and equipment from overheating. Every other movie on the Apollo missions had gotten that wrong.

The fragility of the Lunar Module (LM) really is noticeable when it approaches to dock with the command capsule. As the protective cover comes off and sunlight hits the spacecraft, the reflective foil warps and puffs out, maybe because of the rapid temperature change. At one point, viewers see a camera being installed inside the LM that will later film Armstrong on the surface. That camera will be displayed in an exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in April.

Later in the movie, as Armstrong and Aldrin navigate the LM toward the Moon’s surface, filmgoers hear the 1202 and 1201 alarms, indicating that the radar system was being overwhelmed with data. On the left of the screen, a gauge shows how much fuel is left before the astronauts have to abort. The tension mounts as footage from the control room shows the anxious discussions over whether the alarms can be ignored. Nearly everyone in the audience of the screening, despite already knowing the ending, held their breath until the LM finally touched down.

(To grasp how far Miller went to make the film accurate, consider that he asked NASA historian Bill Barry what Armstrong and Aldrin were hearing in their helmets during the LM descent. The archivists were able to check the original schematics, and they found out it was an intermittent 8 kHz audio tone. “We played it for Buzz, and he said yes, this is exactly what it sounded like,” Miller says.)

Nearly everyone remembers Armstrong’s walking down the ladder and stepping onto the lunar surface. I guarantee nobody has seen footage this clear when he steps down. An onscreen clock reminds filmgoers how little time the astronauts had on this first trip to the Moon: 22 hours on the ground, and only two-and-a-half hours outside in spacesuits.

Miller relied on the work of others to make his movie, and he hopes that the archive his team has built will help other filmmakers and archivists in the future. I asked Slater what had drawn him to the Apollo missions. “When I was 8,” he said, “I saw Apollo 13 at the cinema. I’ve been fascinated ever since.” If he and Miller hope to inspire the next generation, this film is a terrific place to start.

Apollo 11 opens in IMAX theaters on 1 March and nationwide in cinemas a week later. A 40-minute IMAX version for museums will be released on 17 May. A broadcast version will appear on CNN, which backed and funded the film, in July.