On July 16, 1969, my grandfather called me into the living room of his Indiana home and told me to watch his television. I remember seeing a plume of fire and smoke erupt beneath a rocket and then the rocket lift into the air, but after that, my memory of the Apollo 11 mission is blank.
Thankfully, hundreds of cameras and microphones captured the entire mission, and now documentary filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller has assembled select footage and audio recordings into an astounding theatrical release called “Apollo 11.”
Maybe you’re thinking documentaries aren’t your cup of tea, or that it sounds interesting but you’ll catch it on Prime Video in a few months. Don’t do yourself this disservice. If you can see “Apollo 11” in a theater, do so at your soonest convenience.
Why the urgency? Because documentaries have a brief theatrical shelf life, and the true scale of the movie, crafted from previously unseen 70 mm film footage and more than 11,000 hours of audio recordings (according to National Archive News), will be lost on a TV.
You’ll also miss out on the awe that comes with seeing “Apollo 11” on a large screen.
“Apollo 11” opens with crisp, colorful, jaw-dropping shots of the launch pad rolling into place. The contrast of the massive tank treads under the platform and the tiny men standing nearby establishes an epic visual scale and sets the stage for the journey to follow.
Miller didn’t need to cover the colossal effort that took place between President Kennedy’s 1961 speech challenging the U.S. to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade and the morning of the launch. Those opening images say it all: Humankind is aiming big and exceeding its reach.
I was initially confused about one thing, though: the absence of Morgan Freeman. I kept waiting for Freeman’s gentle, reassuring voice to begin narrating the mission and applying significance to the footage, but this never happened.
Instead, Miller successfully tells the story of the Apollo 11 mission using only audio recordings made at the time, including clips of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, people at Mission Control Center in Houston and broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite.
At no point does a narrator step in and take over. Miller wanted to take viewers back to 1969 and leave them there, and using Freeman (or anyone else) to explain what was going on would have pulled viewers out of the moment.
Instead, there’s a compelling sense of being there and watching the mission unfold for the first time.
This sense of immediacy pervades the film. Although Miller and his team used footage from untold cameras, it seems as if his camera is everywhere at once, capturing images of the towering Saturn V before launch, rows of scientists hunched over monitors in Mission Control and thousands of people sprawled along beaches, highways and even a J.C. Penney parking lot to watch the rocket leave terra firma.
Miller allows small details, such as the clothes, hairstyles and funky sunglasses of the era, to tell part of the story. This happened many years ago, those things say.
The footage captured by cameras aboard the Apollo 11 is breathtaking, not in terms of the quality or scope of the images but because it takes viewers to previously unseen places.
I felt chills as the dark side of the moon rolled past the window of the Columbia as Collins piloted the command module in lunar orbit and watched wide-eyed during an unbroken shot of the tiny Eagle growing larger as it ascended to dock with the Columbia after leaving the moon’s surface.
To give viewers a sense of what was taking place, Miller often splits the screen to show multiple perspectives of the same event. This technique is especially effective during the aforementioned docking sequence, which was filmed on both the Columbia and the Eagle.
In the end, however, one of my favorite parts of “Apollo 11” is the banter between the astronauts. Some of the material is pure gold, like when Aldrin follows Armstrong to the surface of the moon and jokes about leaving the door of the Eagle unlocked. (Can you imagine if he’d locked it?)
For all its impressive shots of the launch, the moon landing and the splashdown in the Pacific Ocean eight days after takeoff, “Apollo 11” never loses sight of the fact that this was a human expedition. Instead, Miller continually places the astronauts and the people on the ground at the center of the narrative.
“Apollo 11” is an exhilarating and moving experience from beginning to end. For 93 minutes, I didn’t want to miss a single image or audio clip, and I was never bored. On the contrary, Miller knew just how to use the filmmaking tools at his disposal to evoke wonder and convey the grand and humbling nature of the mission.
As I left the theater, a fellow viewer asked me if I remembered where I was when the Saturn V launched.
After I told him about being at my grandfather’s, he said his family was glued to their TV for days.
“Apollo 11” brought not just our families but the whole world together to experience a historic achievement. In portraying this, the film silently asks where we need to go to make this happen again.
I’m glad Miller let the film speak for itself. As good as Freeman is at narrating documentaries, he would have pulled viewers out of the moment.