For All Mankind (1989)
(On Cable TV, July 2019) I have far too many issues with For All Mankind to consider it the best possible documentary about the American Moon Program, but I’m willing to concede that it’s probably one of the best documentaries ever made about it. Perhaps my biggest objection with the film is one of its fundamental artistic decisions to meld recollections of all the astronauts on all the flights in one single narrative. This is not the right film to watch in order to learn all about the fine differences between Apollo 8 and 11 and 13 and 15—For All Mankind works hard at erasing those distinctions, showing us one narrative in which there are a few issues along the way (13!), wonder at the first view of the Earth from so far away (8), the first steps on the moon (11) and taking a rover out for a spin (15). That’s the film’s central conceit, and it does work most of the time in blurring all missions together into one shared experience. Recording of astronaut interviews are combined with historical footage to form the spine of the film, along with incidental music by Brian Eno. The result manages to make an ethereal, dreamlike, expressionist experience out of the most famous engineering project of the 1960s, giving far more importance to the human aspect of being on another world than what it took to get there. Once more; it’s a fundamental choice, perhaps not the one I would have made … but then again director Al Reinert is the one who sifted through incredible amounts of footage to condense the essence of the project in barely 80 minutes, and there are incredible moments of humanity in hearing about dreams that the astronauts had on the moon, or the way they goof around (slipping and falling) over there, walking or driving their way across the surface. It is, in other words, quite an effective documentary even if you can quibble about its choices. I ended up watching it on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and it felt like the right movie at the right time.