MOVIE REVIEW
“Apollo 11”
Unrated. At AMC Loews Boston Common.
Grade: A
“Apollo 11” could not be more matter-of-fact, direct or magnificent in its elemental simplicity as it vividly documents the historic space mission that climaxed with the lunar landing nearly 50 years ago.
Todd Douglas Miller, the director and editor, went to the National Archives for footage — all available as part of our scientific and cultural heritage — and gives a step-by-step account of the NASA mission that put astronaut Neil Armstrong as the first man on the moon.
It was a fulfillment of the mission President John F. Kennedy launched eight years earlier; a Cold War space race with the Russians.
Miller’s massive undertaking began with hundreds of hours of footage, from various sources and formats, that had to first be converted digitally and preserved.
“Apollo 11” begins just hours before blast-off in July 1969 and follows the three astronauts — Armstrong, the commandeer, Buzz Aldrin, who followed him on the moon 20 minutes later, and Michael Collins, who orbited their spacecraft until his comrades were ready to be retrieved and return to Earth.
With never-before-seen footage, Miller’s 93-minute odyssey is a revelation for those who were alive back when — that would be anyone over 50 — and those who knew it only from last year’s “First Man.”
Beginning today until March 8, “Apollo 11” is an IMAX event nationwide, where the wonders of space travel, with those startling views of our planet and the moon’s surface, really are awe-inspiring.
Miller salutes the many — over 400,000, he said at a post-screening Q&A — who made this space exploration, with its miraculous match of ambition and technical achievement, possible.
The Armstrong here is, unlike Ryan Gosling’s repressed hero in “First Man,” a genial, even cheerful presence.
Miller locates this historic event alongside the world around it. There’s irony that the weekend that saw the culmination of what President Kennedy commissioned was also the weekend of Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick accident that left Mary Jo Kopechne dead, and that JFK’s 1960 presidential rival Richard Nixon was now the president greeting the astronauts as they were retrieved from the ocean on their return.
“Apollo 11” is a film of many wonders. The real wonder of Miller’s work here is his ability to condense and reveal essential steps in an eight-day voyage that remains a pivotal moment in space exploration.
