Apollo 11 (2019)

[MaxwellsDemon]

Just got back from seeing Apollo 11 on an IMAX screen.  I can recommend it to Kerbonauts!  But maybe leave small children at home...

I can imagine the general public might feel a bit lost and confused-- after all, there is a lot of prelaunch detail.  The majority of the footage up through launch I've never seen before, or only very briefly in clips.  As the review I read noted, the astronauts didn't take the 70mm camera with them, so much of the inflight footage has been seen before, but not assembled in this way.  The narration and "guidance" is kept to a bare minimum, with historical Launch Control voiceovers and some Walter Cronkite audio clips woven in.  I found the soundtrack occasionally distracting, but only briefly in each case.

One thing I appreciated is that many of the individuals speaking are identified in on-screen captions, not just the astronauts.  That serves as a setup to Armstrong's speech at the end where he emphasizes that it was much more than three people that made it all possible, which is a pretty good recap of much of the film in a nutshell.

(This is definitely one where the more you know, the more you'll enjoy it.  Von Braun was not referred to or featured, but you'll spot him in the Launch Control Center if you know where to look.  I also don't think they identified him, but at one point I could tell it was Günter Wendt speaking in the white room.  Lots of 'Easter Eggs' like that.)

Edited March 2, 2019 by MaxwellsDemon
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[NSEP]

Another movie about Apollo 11?

Cool!

[MaxwellsDemon]

Just read another bit about it where it was said that the ground footage was shot in  65mm.  (?)   I'd never heard of that format size.

[Brotoro]

I saw this today in IMAX... Excellent!  Well, certainly any space-nerd is going to love it... I don't know how well normal humans will like it. It was well worth seeing in IMAX format.

The strangest thought I had while watching it was, “FINALLY some movie maker got all the paint patterns and rocket surface details correct in their footage of the rocket on the pad and lifting off!”

They did stick in the footage of staging separations from the earlier Saturn test flights...but everything else could have been from Apollo 11 (well...it's hard to tell if random shots of crowds on the beaches, etc., watching the launch were all from Apollo 11).

[MaxwellsDemon]

6 hours ago, Brotoro said:

They did stick in the footage of staging separations from the earlier Saturn test flights...

Yeah, I wondered about that.  Come to think of it, how did they recover that footage anyway, whichever machine it was on?  Was there a "hardened" film capsule?

[Reactordrone]

58 minutes ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

Yeah, I wondered about that.  Come to think of it, how did they recover that footage anyway, whichever machine it was on?  Was there a "hardened" film capsule?

Ejectable camera pods. If you watch the staging footage to the end you can see the cameras capture the moment of ejection just before they shut off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTGk3UM-IOU

A few images of the pods here, https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=219&t=1576721

[MaxwellsDemon]

Cool!  Thank you.