Mondays with Mike: Two thumbs up

Get thee to a movie theater with a great big screen for “Apollo 11.”

Late at night, after Beth retires, I usually channel surf. Most of the time I come up disappointed. Sometimes I run into an old favorite and rewatch it, and then kick myself the next day for staying up too late to see a movie I’d already seen.

Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy.

And every once in awhile, I’ll bump into a movie that had caught my interest when it was in the theaters, but not enough to get me out to see it. Last week, I bumped into “Jackie,” the biopic about the time just before and after JFK’s assassination, and how the enigmatic Jackie Kennedy dealt with it. Natalie Portman’s portrayal of Jackie Kennedy is mesmerizing. For those of a certain age, the film provides a lot of nostalgia. A warning: The assassination was portrayed for what it is more accurately described as: a savage and gruesome murder.

All in all, it was well worth losing a little sleep.

Then, by some lucky accident, a trailer for “Apollo 11” appeared in my Facebook feed. Yes, something useful! Well, there’s been a lot of Apollo 11 stuff lately,”First Man” among others. So at first I thought the movie on my feed was one I’d heard of.

It wasn’t. For one, it’s a documentary. It’s not remotely like anything else on the moon shot I’ve ever seen.  I’d go so far as to say it’s not remotely like any other documentary I’ve seen. It’s stunning, nostalgic, inspiring, and kind of heartbreaking in the way it made it feel like something’s been lost since that time.

Here’s the deal: Somehow, a trove of large format film taken before, during and after the moonwalk was discovered in a forgotten warehouse in Maryland. It was last year in May that Dan Rooney, from the National Archives, wrote an email to “Apollo 11” filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller about the newfound collection. From a Vanity Fair article on the discovery:

“The collection consists of approximately 165 source reels of materials, covering Apollo 8 through Apollo 13,” Rooney wrote. “Thus far, we have definitively identified 61 of those 165 that relate directly to the Apollo 11 mission, including astronaut mission preparations, launch, recovery, and astronaut engagement and tours after the mission.”

These were all shot in 65 mm and printed in 70 mm, the gold standard that was used in films like “The Sound of Music” back in the day. It’s all remarkably vivid.

After lots of restoration, digitization, and research into what the newly found film was showing us, the filmmakers spliced the new footage with all the imagery we’re familiar with, and it’s like the movie goer is there in real time: when astronauts Anderson, Aldrin, and Collins are suiting up, when the engines roar wildly to impossibly lift the enormous Saturn V into space, and until the astronauts return. Somehow, though the audience knows the outcome, all the things are tautly suspenseful.

The movie is ingenious in that it moves at pace through each day of the mission, explaining what needs to be explained along the way, all without a narrator. The film narrates itself with tempo, text titles, and relying on the audio of Walter Cronkite and NASA people to fill in the dots when needed. The film also employs simple graphics to illustrate orbits, docking maneuvers, and other technical aspects.

When I walked out of the theater, it dawned on me that the biopic and the documentary had two things in common: Walter Cronkite and JFK. I think it’s fair to say Cronkite and Kennedy’s levels of literacy, intelligence, and disposition are not matched by their modern day counterparts. Both movies make good use of footage from Cronkite’s reports. And in Apollo 11, there is footage from Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech at Rice University in 1962 when he drew the line in the sand and committed the U.S. to getting a man to the moon before the decade’s end:

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year–a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority–even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.

Apollo 11 makes clear the incredible complexity, the near impossibility of any one of several parts of the mission. In so doing, it makes landing people on the moon and getting them back safely seem even more impressive in retrospect. It also captures that inspirational teamwork that the movie Apollo 13 portrayed—but man, it’s real this time. All that footage is real. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and please, see it on the big screen.