The visual splendor in Al Reinert’s For All Mankind seems designed to remedy the audience’s collective memory of the moon landing as a grainy, square image on television. Between 1968 and 1972, the Apollo Program sent nine missions to the moon, each equipped with film equipment to document discoveries and obstacles, and Reinert’s distillation of the literally thousands of hours of footage stashed in NASA’s archives give the impression of a single outer-space journey.
The found-footage voyage is given a familiar sci-fi trajectory. Brave men are fitted into bulky space suits while engineers stare at screens in the control room, and the poker faces that the astronauts employ to try to hide their anxiety during liftoff breaks into unguarded awe as the Earth is viewed from the rocket’s porthole. Save for an opening speech by John F. Kennedy, the film deliberately discards exposition and context. For one, there’s no attempt at differentiating one mission from another, and, even though they are either glimpsed in the footage or heard in the soundtrack, none of the great Apollo missioners (including Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Mike Collins, and Alan Bean) are identified by name.
The approach may flatten the political perspective of the Space Race, yet lends the footage (such a goldmine of flag-waving imagery for the likes of Ron Howard and Michael Bay) a timeless inclusiveness, honoring the film’s title by positing a trip to the moon that’s a hearteningly communal enterprise. More sensuous spectacle than analytical reportage, For All Mankind doesn’t starve for privileged moments. Sequences such as a vision of the blue globe from the back of the rocket (through a circular opening that suggests a silent-movie iris) or the gliding shots of the lunar surface stretching into inky-black horizons visualize what one astronaut describes as the mission’s feeling of “supreme elation.” If not the screen’s ultimate portrait of space travel, For All Mankind remains a peerless planetarium show.
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