Review of Apollo 11 (2019) by Davrosdaleks1 — 03 Mar 2019

Using a surprisingly large amount of existing footage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, including the spaceship, NASA, and even the Texas unit responsible for picking the astronauts up safely, this documentary offers what is a thorough beat-by-beat depiction of the monumental event.

I thought this was going to be a look-back with modern-day interviews and narration, but nope, none of that. Only narration is some from the news footage of the launch. Any supplemental information is supplied by text and infographics of the space flight. I was pleasantly surprised by this. It really makes you feel like you're there in '69. I also learned stuff I never knew before like the multiple teams utilized by NASA for different aspects of the mission and the fact that the astronauts had to be immediately quarantined after the flight.

The whole thing looks and sounds great. (Though admittedly, I saw this in IMAX, which probably helps.) The digital restoration of those bright seventy colors really makes the thing pop. The audio for the launching rockets are really loud and completely capture the experience. The dramatic music really accentuates the dramatic tone of the mission. Only downside is that they play the same music during the ending credits which consists of footage celebrating the conquering heroes. It completely doesn't match what you see. It makes you feel like you're about to see a downer twist ending like a deadly organism sneaked along with the mission or the astronauts were killed and replaced by duplicates because they knew too much. A downside is that a lot of this film is people at panels. I did lose attention a couple times.

If you can't do slow-paced, this might be not for you. However, if you're interested in how the very first moon landing actually went down then this is exactly what you're looking for. (There was applauding by some audience members at the end.