Reviewed by Stuart O'Connor
Featuring Michael Collins, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jim Lovell,
Dave Scott, John Young, Gene Cernan, Alan Bean,
Edgar Mitchell, Charlie Duke, Harrison Schmitt
Produced by Duncan Copp & Chris Riley
UK certification PG | UK RRP £19.99
DVD Region 2 | Runtime 100 minutes
Directed by David Sington
As a child, I watched man's first steps onto the moon live on TV, as it happened. I was just five years old at the time, but the memory has stayed with me ever since. Now, thanks to this stunning documentary, a whole new generation will get to experience what the rest of us did — the wonder of mankind setting foot on an alien world for the very first time.
With a combination of archive footage and new interviews with some of the remaining astronauts, In The Shadow of The Moon tells the story of the Apollo missions that began with US president John Kennedy announcing that NASA would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, and ended with the final Apollo mission in 1972. The word heroes gets bandied about a lot these days, and thanks to the tabloids the word has lost much of its value. But these men truly were heroes — especially when you consider they were heading into the unknown, while sitting in a tin can on top of a gigantic bomb (and early on the film features plenty of footage of Saturn rockets blowing up on the launchpad).
What comes across in the interviews with the remaining astronauts (most of whom are now in their 70s) is the very ordinariness of the men themselves — as they keep telling us, they were just a bunch of guys doing their jobs. There are no massive egos, and plenty of laughs — especially from Michael Collins, who steals the movie with his gentle warmth and wry sense of humour. Collins was the man who stayed behind in the Apollo 11 command module, orbiting the moon while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong cavorted on its surface. But he shows no signs of bitterness at all. Speaking of Armstrong, he's notable by his modern-day absence; now famously reclusive, he hardly gives interviews any more and in the film he appears only in archive footage. But not hearing from him doesn't detract from the experience, it just serves to make him a more mythical figure.
In The Shadow of The Moon goes behind the science that we've all seen so many times, and puts a human face to the Apollo project. It was a very human endeavour, as these noble men remind us, and one that seems to have fallen by the wayside in the intervening years. This documentary is a gripping and timely reminder of just what humanity can achieve.
EXTRAS *** Behind The Shadow: basically just lots and lots of deleted stuff — more archive footage, more interviews with the surviving astronauts and more lovely shots of rockets and space and the moon and the Earth. Plus there's a featurette called Scoring Apollo, which is all abut the recording of the music for the documentary.