2000: 2009:

directed by Al Reinert
“Filmed on location by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

Criterion #54.

(Moon landing documentary, of sorts, made entirely of NASA archival film.)

“Make no mistake,” as our president would say: this is by far the most astounding and spectacular and terrifying and important footage ever shot. It has been transferred and enlarged and printed wonderfully; the picture is pristine and frequently beautiful. The work done by the filmmakers in sorting through the countless hours of previously unseen NASA footage, and then making these selections public at such high quality, is a great and important service.

And continue to make no mistake: You can’t watch this stuff without being awed and thrilled and frightened and inspired (not necessarily in that order). Yes, by now a lot of the basic images may have collapsed into cliche — familiarity has drained the standard “blue marble” photo of most of its power — but it hardly takes any variation, just a tilt or two of the lens, a slightly new angle not seen before, and suddenly one can’t help but be contemplating it afresh, for real. Good god, that’s everything, all of it, surrounded by nothing, and someone went and stood in the nothing to look back and photograph everything. It’s tremendously, nauseatingly real.

In the commentary track, astronaut Eugene Cernan (“Last man on the moon”) says:

I can remember standing on the surface of the moon in sunlight looking back at the Earth surrounded by the blackest black that you can conceive in your mind, a three-dimensional blackness without a beginning and without end: it’s not darkness, but blackness. And the Earth, with all its beauty and all its splendor, lives three-dimensionally within this blackness.

That’s not just theoretical. Like it or not, that unthinkable enormity (in all senses) is something that a man really stood and looked at and saw, and it was as real and ordinary as this tissue box on my desk. A real man, a person so real and ordinary that after returning to the everything from the nothing, he did something as banal as record a commentary track for Criterion. Seeing it — that three-dimensional blackness without beginning or end — in a photograph isn’t as intense as looking directly at it, thank god, but it remains mind-boggling: literally unthinkable. And here it is, the unthinkable, captured on film by a few humans who wore death-proof suits and carried cameras beyond the edge of the living world.

So make no mistake: I was glad to watch this.

Aaaaand… you can make mistakes now.

C’mon, Simone: let’s talk about my big “but.”

The unique and tremendous power of this footage is that it is real. So it is inescapably frustrating that the filmmakers have stitched it together with the customary white lies of film — and a few egregiously gray ones — and in so doing have needlessly diminished it.

There were six moon landings and 11 manned Apollo missions in all. The approach taken by the director is to edit together the best footage from all of them, to create a montage that gives the general cinematic impression of a single mission from start to finish. The rationale for this approach is presented in various ways and in various places in the Criterion package: it allowed the use of all the best footage in one movie, it emphasized the universality of the endeavor by treating all the individual astronauts as essentially interchangeable, it avoided the need for an excess of technical-historical detail that would only distract from the cinematic force of the images.

I find all that completely sympathetic. It is perfectly legitimate to edit non-fiction film with an eye for poetry rather than encyclopedic accuracy. And this material cries out for poetic treatment.

But manipulating documentary footage in this way demands certain scruples that these filmmakers do not have. Their film does more than just edit things together out of sequence. It tells unnecessary lies, repeatedly.

In the very first minutes there is a shot of a crew of astronauts (I think from Apollo 16) walking down a hallway in their suits, headed for the launchpad. The arm of a woman who stands just off-camera appears briefly, waving at them as they walk by. In the film we hear her voice, crystal clear, cheerfully saying “Y’all take care now!” like a waitress might say to anybody who went through the door. That’s an odd and amusing thing to say to astronauts headed for the moon, I thought; what a strange and wonderful detail from way back in 1972, recovered by these filmmakers for me to re-experience and savor in the present day. Then the big “but” hit me: But wait, I thought. The NASA film crew surely wasn’t carrying a boom mike down this hallway. This footage is probably silent. And come to think of it, that sure didn’t sound like sound from 1972. I think that was ADR. Someone in an editing room in 1989 made up those words and stuck that in there to give a sense of place.

Whoever did it was comfortable so doing because it’s the kind of thing that’s done all the time in editing rooms: “We need to lay on some intuitive sound to make this shot feel alive. Let’s put some foley footsteps in there and some crowd noise from outside the door. And I guess when you see the woman’s arm wave we need some sound to justify it or it will seem weirdly silent. I guess we’ll just put in a voice.”

Generally, that’s all well and good for just another day in post-production. But I’m watching this to be put in touch with the real moments of which the film is an artifact. Adding phony footstep sounds is already a little suspect, though I can see the argument to be made for its subliminal value; certainly as a claim about the past it is very mild. But adding phony dialogue is simply no good! That is a strong claim: a woman said this. When in fact she did not. Maybe.

Only a few shots later, the man who closes the elevator door on the gantry is clearly heard to quietly say “Godspeed, men” as he salutes the astronauts. But wait, no he didn’t! Not necessarily! Someone sneaked into this stash of truth and inserted some lies! Hey, I was watching that!

Admittedly there’s not a lot of that kind of ADR lying, but those two instances came very early on and got me off to a bad start. The sin committed more often is false crosscutting. The only flight director we’re shown at mission control is Gene Kranz (whom you know as “Ed Harris”), with all footage seemingly coming from the same day, and maybe the same hour. I can accept that the premise of the film is that we’re not worrying about details: he’s just “a flight director” in this poem of the moon landings. If it cuts to him directing during footage of the launch and then again during footage of the moon landing and he’s wearing the same tie, we just have to roll with it. And I think I can. But when they show someone on the moon making a joke, and then they cut to him laughing, that really irks me! Was that how he looked laughing at that joke, or not? Is this a real moment that was part of a remarkable historical event, resurrected decades later by the marvel of film technology? Or is this an editing room invention from 1989 that is no more significant to me than anything else concocted by film editors in 1989? Those are pretty different categories!

When a video image of the Earth as seen from lunar orbit is shown on the screen in mission control, then we cut to reaction shots of various mission control crew staff members looking awed or reflective. Are they really looking at that image of the Earth on the screen? Or is it just their reaction to something else, maybe on a different day, during a different mission, and it just happened to be what the editor thought their reaction to seeing the Earth on the screen “should feel like”? My impression was that we were getting some of both.

Sly montage technique (as seen regularly at the Academy Awards and elsewhere) in which different sources are mixed and matched to create rhyming couplets — Tom Hanks dials his phone and then black-and-white Joan Crawford answers her phone, etc. — is post-modern fun that is absolutely antithetical to documentary. Just because all this footage is from NASA and none of it is from It’s a Wonderful Life doesn’t mean that what’s going on here is any different. We see an astronaut step off the lander on to the lunar surface and hear Neil Armstrong saying his line about it being a “one small step for [a] man.” Then we hear another astronaut’s interview about how when he stepped on to the moon, he made a joke because nobody would care what the “second guy” said, and then see the same video feed continue as a second astronaut hops down from the lander. We hear him say: “That may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” Wow, I thought, how amusing! Why has nobody ever told me that that’s what Buzz Aldrin said?

Because it’s NOT what Buzz Aldrin said. It’s what Pete Conrad said, many months later, during Apollo 12. The moment created in the film, in which one line follows the other in short succession during the same video feed, is like a conversation between Tom Hanks and Joan Crawford: they both take place in dreamy silver screen land, for the viewer’s pleasure. “That’s the wonderful magic of the movies! P.S. The moon landing itself was real, though, we swear.”

I can’t overstress that this matters. You can’t cut historical footage like it’s fiction without devaluing the fact that it’s real. I want to be allowed to muse on the astonishing reality of everything I see! That is, in fact, the only thing I want from a movie like this. What else are we here for?

Turning on my jaded, skeptical, TV-watching, mediocrity-parsing brain is really, really detrimental to my ability to experience awe. Detrimental to my outlook as a whole. Why couldn’t the filmmakers see that the greatest gift they could offer would be to refrain from asking that of me?

A running theme in my mind during the movie was that man’s comprehension of the reality into which he is venturing is simply insufficient. Great emphasis is given to showing the astronauts goofing around, doing flips in zero gravity, acting like monkeys. It’s meant to give homely, human charm to the proceedings. But to me it said: yup, these are monkeys. Monkeys somehow figured out how to do this, monkeys put themselves in a tiny can and went way, way beyond the edge of what they understand, into a three-dimensional blackness without beginning and without end.

We are shown a real photograph of THE ENTIRE EARTH, to contemplate its unthinkable everything-ness, over which one of the astronauts is heard musing in an interview: “The three things that I associated with Earth were people, and green trees, and fresh water.” This is so bizarrely small-minded and stupid — you associate three things with Earth? And yet against the backdrop of infinite space, which is to say the reality of the universe, that’s just who we are. Hopelessly provincial monkeys with some dumb shit to say.

One of the astronauts describes the moon as “2001 type stuff.” This is what one of the twelve human beings ever to stand on the actual moon has to say about it. I don’t hold it against him: that’s just what we as humans have got to work with. The real moon does look kind of like the moon as seen in that movie 2001, come to think of it.

I saw the Earth and thought about the future of the species. I thought about climate change and pollution and how it is and will remain unmanaged because even as mankind gets big, man remains small. I felt down.

But then I had a flash of relief: I’m only thinking this stuff because that’s the mindset of this movie. This movie is making me think about Man The Mediocre because it has deliberately turned the most amazing documentary footage imaginable into something marketably less than a documentary, something less threatening, less real, less complex. Like planetarium shows have done for decades, the filmmakers set out to reveal the spiritual behind the science and instead just made another middlebrow Hallmark card. Neither here nor there, neither fact nor poem, neither man nor monkey.

But make no mistake: the raw materials are truly stirring stuff, and they shine through. Between the moments of frustration and the moments of despondency, I was moved. You’ll just have to do some editing in your head as you watch, philosophically and otherwise. And that seems a shame, since the whole point of the movie was to do the editing for us.

The Criterion package is great. The movie looks great, the commentary with Gene Cernan (and director Al Reinert) is engaging and personal, the bonus features are nicely assembled. In a way, they supply the traditional documentary grounding that the movie lacks.

The music is by crossword puzzle stalwart Brian Eno. I assumed he would bring ambient awe and terror to outer space, but the music is all dipsy-doodle Museum of Science type stuff. The music as the lander descends sounds like either the pinnacle of human endeavor or a spooky carnival on Punky Brewster. Or possibly the hold music when Henry calls the spooky carnival to make reservations.

It turns out that that particular track (“Quixote”) is actually by Roger Eno, Brian’s brother (who has, unfairly, never been in a crossword puzzle). Herein, it seems, hangs sort of a tale, one not told by the Criterion disc. According to the Wikipedia page for Eno’s original soundtrack album, the film was first assembled in 1983 as a purely non-narrative montage to music, with no voice-over. To give it wider appeal, it was gradually reworked into the 1989 version seen today, in which process some of the music from Eno’s 1983 soundtrack was replaced by music from his 1988 album Music for Films III, which is actually sort of a collaborative album, containing tracks by several other musicians (such as Roger). Having given a quick skim listen through the original 1983 soundtrack, I feel like it offers something more spiritually cohesive than what’s heard in the finished film. I also feel like the purer, artsier 1983 version of the film might well have eased nearly all of my objections above. It sounds more like the conscientious poetry that this footage deserves.

The finished film offers no musical cues that aren’t at least partially obscured by voice-over. The two longest stretches come during the spooky carnival sequence and then the end credits. Since of those two, only the end credits is actually by Brian Eno, that’s what we’re going with. The track is called “An Ending (Ascent)” on the album and runs about twice as long; I’m giving you as much of it as could be extracted from the film without including any dialogue. End Credits.

To me this sounds like 6th grade science class. Someone wheeled in the TV on a cart so we could watch something lame.

Footnote: Apparently, that’s not what “dipsy-doodle” means. But it should be.