In the Shadow of the Moon

Saw In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the moon landing. To get personal for a second, I have to admit I am completely taken by the awesomeness of the moon landing. I love it. I turn a jaundiced eye to most things but am a complete sucker for the poetry mined out of the moon landing. As such, I had a very personal, very emotional reaction to this film. The moon landing is put in the context of a tumultuous America. John and Ted Kennedy assassinated, Martin Luther King gunned down, racists and sexists showing their teeth in a protracted civil rights imbroglio while Vietnam made a slow grim mockery of our national pride and out of all of this riot and confusion, humanity stretched out its arm as a collective whole and put its fingerprint on the moon. Amazing.

The film seems to often juxtapose the profound and moving with the tedious and trivial. They describe, for example, how Aldrin peed in his suit's urine pouch while he checked the moon lander's stability. This did not ground the film for me, although that may be what they were going for, but felt like an uncomfortable shoulder-rubbing of beauty and ugliness. thematically, we move from the moon landing of Apollo 11 to the disaster of Apollo 13. This too was a triumph of engineering but there's somehow less pride to be had from merely rescuing men who were put into harms way. We briskly move from that to the following missions, where they collected rocks and drove their little buggy around. We are mercifully spared the vulgar nonsense of golfing on the moon.

Anyway, as with all stories, the question is where to end it and this one ends bittersweetly with the reminder that we don't go to the moon anymore. The surviving astronauts recount how their flights effected them. Some are newly appreciative of what we have here on Earth and shake their heads at people going to war over the price of gasoline (which only serves to further fouls our air.) Others have become more spiritual, explaining that after landing on the moon, they found God. One speaks powerfully of how they were hit with the realization that we, indeed even the spaceship, are all made of atoms born in stars.

The first landing on the moon felt like the natural climax and ending of the film and the continuation onto 13, 14, 15, etc felt sort of clumsy and muddled. The re-entry and ensuing media circus is saved for absolute last however, which goes to show that the filmmakers know their job after all. It was an alright film about a subject very dear to me.