Apollo 11

Director: Todd Douglas Miller

This is a stunning documentary, which captures the nine day journey of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon and back. Using archival footage, including the film that astronauts took themselves as well as the cameras that were attached to the Apollo 11, this is not your traditional documentary. There are no talking heads with the astronauts or people from mission control looking back on the event. Instead, the film uses the transmissions and news coverage to serve as the narrator. This keeps the focus sharp and you are in every moment with the astronauts and mission control. I never realized how many people were actually involved in something like this and it was interesting to see the waves of new people who stepped in at various points as the mission progressed.

This would make a very interesting companion piece to First Man. I quite enjoyed that film and the doc doesn't give you as much insight about the astronauts and story behind it, focusing only on the mission itself.

Having not lived through the event, I'm wondering how much of this is previously unreleased footage. There is a nail-biting sequence late in the film of the five minutes of the lunar lander doing its final fuel burn and landing on the moon. There was also some intense footage of them coming back through the Earth's atmosphere. I regret not seeing this in IMAX. While I saw this on a bigger screen, nothing would have compared to seeing this on the largest screen possible. I was utterly captivated and couldn't imagine what the people watching in the 60's would have thought.

On a side note, it's easy to see why there are conspiracy theories about the moon landing being fake. The footage during the landing looks so, for lack of a better word, unrealistic. While I don't believe the theory, the moon has no real detail until they were maybe a few feet from the ground. When that happened, the details were very focused.

History and space buffs will get the most out of this, but either way, this fantastic doc deserves to be seen on the big screen. The imagery alone should be enough to captivate anyone.