This documentary follows the American side of the space race, allowing the surviving astronauts to tell their stories, and in fact one of them makes a reference to Tom Wolfe's 'The Right Stuff' - having read the book and having hoped he really 'had it'. The film of Wolfe's book does cover the same territory, though this has gone into a lot of it in much greater depth - hours of painstaking effort must have gone into matching film of, for instance, one guy at Mission Control mouthing ''Yeah!' as we hear his voice in the recorded exchange with successful spacemen. The director has done his best to put it all in historical perspective, as Stateside apartheid came to a violent end and planes poured bombs and chemicals down on the Vietnamese. This last footage accompanies astronauts' talk of having it easy while their buddies were fighting for their country. The sub-plot of the space-race being the vanguard of the arms race is somehow threaded in there, too. For a while, popular feeling in the States was turning away from space and Kennedy's promise, as if talking to children, (not included here) to put a man on the moon; but that was until it happened. So between 1968 and 1972, nine American 'modules' were rocketed to the moon, and twelve men walked upon it. The newly unearthed footage of space, the earth, the moon and 'home movies' of inside the spacecraft have been spliced together with the astronauts' reminisces to create quite a new drama, and perhaps never before has it been so well described just how enormous the Apollos were; looking here as broad as football pitches, and with their tiny peashooter payload. It makes sense on seeing this to forget about starmen for a while. Mike Collins had as much to say about the background, the mission and the result as anyone. He said that just for a while everyone was saying ''we' did it" instead of "they did it" - it was 'ephemeral' but it was there. Ultimately, this is a beautifully crafted movie, able to drop jaws in the age of digital blockbuster fantazoom effects, and the lead up to the Moon-shot is still able to recreate that old tension.
Review of In the Shadow of the Moon
