Apollo 11 (2019) - Eye-opening documentary is a five star triumph
https://www.theguardian.com/film/201...e-star-triumph (with Official Trailer)
The documentary Apollo 11 starts, as the famous mission did, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Trucks ferry massive rocket props, machinery grinds as it would in any construction zone, the sky is a crystal blue. The scene is, in a word, vibrant – so startlingly alive that for the first few minutes, I wasn’t sure if I was watching footage from 1969 or a Nasa promo shot from last year.
That present-ness is one of the film’s major feats, credit due to director Todd Douglas Miller, who has found a brilliant way to portray the first moon landing by doing nothing more than the gargantuan task of faithfully rejuvenating the historical record. The documentary is seamless curation of archival work; Miller and his team, in partnership with Nasa and the National Archives, sifted through 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio and restored reams of original film, including hyper-detail 70mm footage that languished in the archives, boxed up and forgotten, since 1969. The result is a stunning project of historical preservation – no narration, no cutaway interviews, no recreations, just original material synced with some music and the occasional diagram.
The 93-minute film is anchored by four pivotal moments in the Apollo 11 mission: lift-off, landing the Eagle lunar module on the moon, reconnecting Eagle with the Columbia spacecraft to return home, and re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. We already know the outcome of these risks, and yet the sequences are still mesmerizing. With a score that ranges from swelling orchestra to a single thump, thump, thump of a heartbeat, coupled with stitches of headset and Mission Control recordings, the movie’s technical spacecraft scenes are less suspense baits than genuinely moving, hypnotic odes to teamwork.
I watched it last night and, IMO, it really is that good .....
The 70mm footage is stunningly realistic - I sweated with the crowd as I waited for lift-off .....
The world premiere of Apollo 11 took place in Salt Lake City at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2019. It was given a limited release in the United States on March 1, 2019 in IMAX through Neon and will be released in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2019 through Universal Pictures.
Universal Pictures released Apollo 11 in the U.S. on digital download, DVD and Blu-ray on May 14, 2019.