Apollo 11 (2019)
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Apollo 11 Movie Review
Apollo 11 is a 2019 documentary film directed by Todd Douglas Miller. It’s a very good, but ultimately flawed experiment.
It focuses on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the first spaceflight to land humans on the Moon. The film consists solely of archival footage, including 70 mm film that was previously unreleased to the public. And that was just wonderful to witness and it made the whole movie feel highly important, pretty much in the vein of Peter Jackson’s ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’.
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When you are watching the real moon landing and the real people behind it in front of your eyes, it’s downright special. Yes, ‘First Man’ is a better film overall and that movie creates a cinematic experience like rare others, but this is a different film which portrays literally what happened and nothing is exaggerated or changed in facts so it pretty much serves as a time capsule and a very important one as this date remains iconic in the field space research.
I loved watching the Moon landing and in particular seeing the scientists at work and the real Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and so on. That was excellent and I could not believe my eyes how good and crisp this footage is. They really polished it and made it feel modern which created a very interesting viewing experience for sure.
But ultimately Apollo 11 is just pretty good and never great because of the fatal mistake on the part of the filmmakers which is their decision to not portray any interviews or narration. I am okay with the latter part, but the interviews I felt were missing undoubtedly.
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The movie needed at least some sort of experiential or intellectual point of view or discussions or real people talking how it all went down. Yes, we see all of that visually and we hear the news stories and real footage from the time, but the interviews are missing because the film ended up being just a great time capsule and not a more insightful, more sophisticated recollection of events that it should have been.
Apollo 11 features unbelievably polished, superb real archival footage of this famous mission and following the Moon landing as it really happened and captured on screen really created a fascinating time capsule of a movie. It’s thus a very important documentary, but not a great one as the decision to not feature any interviews backfired quite a bit as it led to a too straightforward and less insightful film.
