Apollo 11 (2019)

I have not seen First Man, partly because of how I feel about previous Damien Chazelle hits and partly because I don't trust its accuracy. But this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first human lunar landing, so I felt like honoring the event somehow. Besides, an esteemed documentary was bound to teach me something.

Unlike most docs, this one has no narrator, unless you count contemporary audio clips from Walter Cronkite among others. Nor do we have anyone speaking directly to the camera, as in a portion of an interview. It's all old, sometimes previously unpublicized footage. The only additions are periods of dramatic, often bass-heavy music, using only '60s instruments.

You might find the lack of after-the-fact talking a welcome change of pace. I didn't. It limits the educational aspect, and the whole doesn't feel as cohesive as it could. The main advantage, such as it is, is a reduction in potential emotional manipulation. (A critic noted several times that people on screen applauded, but it didn't seem especially charged or frequent to me.)

Having been born in '82, I have little idea which footage was not commonly available before. I did learn a few things, such as the ruffled yet motionless flag and the need to circumnavigate Earth in order to build up enough velocity. Might I say, astronomical numbers unnerve me. After a considerable slowing sequence at the moon, the new steady speed is still upward of a mile a second.

Unfortunately, being so much younger than the occasion worked against my excitement. I couldn't relive the erstwhile suspense, and I knew the ending too well to fake it. We don't even see any moments when failure looked likely. Add in the scarcity of manned space flight since and the improbability of a future resurgence, and I found it only slightly more interesting than I would have found the inauguration ceremony for Nixon that year.

For all the high ratings, I get the feeling I'm not the only relative youngster who feels this way. My theater had an unusually elder-heavy crowd. They didn't sound too excited either, but that may have to do with their general energy levels.

I was going to express relief that the doc is only 93 minutes, but in retrospect, I kinda wish it had been longer. Not just with supplementary info like interviews; we don't see much with the astronauts actually on the moon. Eh, maybe the remaining footage wasn't so usable.

That brings up another issue: audiovisual quality. With a lack of touch-ups, it doesn't look very good, and some dialog is tricky to make out. Come to think of it, that's especially bad news for the seniors in the audience.

Clearly, I'm not in the filmmakers' target demographic. If you are, or if you're more optimistic that we'll set up camp on Mars, then you're bound to get more out of A11 than I did.