Documentary Review: 'Apollo 11'

On March 1, 2019, Neon (the production company that distributed 2017's I, Tonya) and Universal Pictures released Apollo 11, Todd Douglas Miller's documentary about the first manned lunar landing. Produced by CNN Films and Statement Pictures, the documentary focuses on the eight-day period between July 16 and 24, 1969, with a few "flashback" sequences tracking the careers of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins via montages of black-and-white and color still photos provided by the astronauts and their families.

Miller, who also edited and produced Apollo 11, eschews the conventions of most documentary films by not using a mix of "present day" interviews, voiceover narration, or dramatic recreation of events. Instead, Miller and his team use a technique called "direct cinema," relying exclusively on archival material from the National Air and Space Administration (NASA), which consists of a mix of 16mm, 35mm, and newly rediscovered 70mm prints stored in the space agency's historical records.

Apollo 11 actually begins with a few scenes shot on July 15, 1969, the day before the launch. We watch never-before-seen footage of the 363 ft. tall Saturn V booster rocket being transported slowly to its pad at Complex 39 of the John F. Kennedy Space Center near Cocoa Beach, Florida. We see how huge the Saturn V's Crawler-Transporter (CT) was (it weighed 2,721 tons at curb weight and could haul the 6,540,000 lb three-stage rocket over the three-mile distance from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad at 1 mph.) Miller cuts from the CT/Saturn V to the Launch Control building at what was called "Cape Kennedy," where NASA's launch team goes over some of the preliminaries for the main event on July 16.

Throughout this introduction, we not only hear the recorded conversations of NASA officials and the anonymous Launch Control announcer giving updates on the launch status but also snippets from CBS anchor Walter Cronkite's commentary from contemporary news broadcasts.

Theatrical release poster. © 2019 NEON and CNN Films

While watching the 93-minute-long Apollo 11, viewers follow the now-iconic team of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins as they go on what Cronkite called "man's greatest adventure."  From the tense last hours before the launch on July 16 to the triumphant return to Earth of Command Module Columbia on July 24, the documentary distills the drama, the joy, and the feeling of accomplishment that millions of people around the world felt when they heard Mission Commander Armstrong say "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

My Take

I was six years old on July 20, 1969, and living in South America with my mom and older half-sister when Apollo 11 made its historic voyage from the Earth to the Moon. Even though I was young, I was aware of the mission and what it meant to humanity to put two astronauts on another celestial body. Of course, I couldn't grasp the enormity of the Apollo effort, its cost in money and (sadly) astronauts' lives at that young age, but ever since Apollo 8's December 1968 flight to the Moon, I was already space-crazy.

Like millions of people around the world, I watched spellbound the news broadcasts on Colombian television. I can't remember if I watched the July 16, 1969 launch live: I probably did because Apollo 11 left Earth on a Wednesday while school was out for the summer, and I'm pretty sure that Inravision (Colombia's state-run TV network) was getting live coverage from the international media pool.

However, I do have hazy memories of watching the Moon landing live on the night of July 20 with my mom, half-sister, and our two maids in our Bogota apartment. We had a Zenith color TV that Mom had bought in Miami before our move to Colombia, but at the time there was no color broadcasting in the country, so all of the news coverage was in glorious black-and-white.

Of course, I've watched many U.S. documentaries about Project Apollo in even more glorious color since then, and they have overwritten my hazy Spanish-only memories. And some of the footage from those documentaries (especially 2009's When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions) appears in Todd Douglas Miller's Apollo 11. 

Apollo 11 works well as a film because of Miller's decision to avoid the usual cliches of documentaries. Like Ken Burns's The Central Park Five, it uses a technique called direct cinema. This means that there are no 21st Century interviews with surviving members of the Apollo Project team or their family members, no "voice of God" narration, nor is there a militaristic/triumphant score in the same style as Richard Blair-Oliphant's music for When We Left Earth. 

Miller chose instead to use footage that was mostly exclusively shot during the Apollo 11 mission. For the most part, he and his team stuck to that rule, except for a sequence that was lifted from footage shot during the Apollo 8 flight's propulsion boost phase.

Apollo 11 is a visually and narratively impressive film. The launch sequence and the preliminaries are particularly riveting; we know what is going to happen and that the mission will succeed, but Miller's use of previously unreleased footage from NASA 70 mm prints and closed-circuit TV videos create a suspenseful atmosphere, especially when the launch team is revealed to be fixing a leaky valve in one of the Saturn V rocket's three stages just as the three astronauts are in the elevator on their way up to the Command Module three hours before the launch.

The direct cinema approach gives the audience - especially younger viewers who live in a world where Apollo 11 is half a century in the past - a sense of "you are there." It is enhanced by an unobtrusive electronic score composed by Matt Morton, who worked with director Miller on 2014's Dinosaur 13. Interestingly, Morton did not use any devices made in the 2000s to create the subtle yet effective underscore; instead, he only used electronic synthesizers and other instruments that existed in 1969.

Comcast-owned Universal Pictures, which is the international distributor for Apollo 11, released the digital download, DVD, and Blu-ray home media editions on May 14, 2019, three months after the theatrical run. The DVD and Blu-ray discs present the film with English subtitles (feature film only) and two extra features - the theatrical trailer and a short featurette about the discovery of the 70 mm prints in NASA archives and how they enhance the Apollo 11 experience.

Whether you are a long-time Apollo Project aficionado (like me) or are a younger viewer who was born decades after Armstrong and Aldrin first set foot upon the Moon, Apollo 11 is definitely worth watching.