It is now 2022, and I never thought that 50 years ago, mankind has already explored the heaven to this extent. It makes me long for the future. How will humans explore the world in the coming decades? Thanks to criterion collection for the 4K restoration of this film, tribute!

Absolutely fascinating documentary exploring the Apollo missions to land on the moon. Essentially, the film charts what a complete mission was like from the launch (it is pretty clear Ron Howard composed his shots for Apollo 13 based on this footage ) to the landing on the Moon. The film only uses archive footage and audio from all the missions shot by NASA and the astronauts in space and audio interviews with the astronauts are used as a form of narration. But what footage it is!! Of course, an awareness that this is real footage makes this all the more fascinating ( a humorous subtitle reminds us that this was shot on location ). Reinert also has an innate sense of crafting a story through the editing, moving between footage shot at Mission Control and the astronauts from all the missions to tell the story. The film does lose a little momentum once the astronauts land on the moon, but the footage shown is never less than stunning.

Needs to be 8 hours long. 1989 (62nd) Academy Award nominations: Best Documentary - Feature

Although this movie uses film from many Apollo missions and presents it as a complete lunar "mission" the film is still exceptional. An arty documentary using the artronauts own voices. I am always taken by the audio and visuals during the Saturn V launch sequence. Listen loud. It's chill-enducing. Watch this now.

A romantic oral history the Apollo moon missions, as told by the participating crew members. Although this phase of the space program spanned four years, ten missions and six crewed landings, the filmmakers have bundled the whole lot together in a single loose narrative, presumably to avoid covering the same subjects multiple times. Other documentaries, before and since, have addressed the scientific, societal and dramatic aspects of each excursion. This one takes a more personal angle. What did the Apollo astronauts see, hear, feel and imagine while they coasted through the cosmos at 25,000 miles an hour? Our answers are culled from a cache of old materials - candid handheld footage, behind-the-scenes film and spoken recollections - and they reveal a refreshingly human side of the team. Now that we’ve erected statues and dedicated textbook chapters in their honor, it’s easy to paint these guys into a corner as some thing more; hard-nosed, no-nonsense, tirelessly dedicated to the job and nothing else. In reality, they were snared by feelings of isolation, reflection, jealousy, elation and wonder, just like anyone. The trip to the moon is a long one, so it probably shouldn’t come as such a surprise that the crew allowed themselves ample time for quiet, poetic rumination. _For All Mankind_ is at its best while indulging such flights of fancy. Marveling at the dozens of campfires spread over the African continent after dark, each representing a unique Saharan tribe. Pondering the significance of it all whilst a stark, shrinking Earth is offset by a field of infinite darkness. Sharing a good private joke with the boys back in mission control. Enjoying the score of _2001: A Space Odyssey_ while screaming towards the unknown. It all serves as great imagination fuel that comforts, excites and broadens the mind. Though it’s short on duration and light on background, _For All Mankind_ provides a wealth of intellectual brain candy and frequent insights that border on the profound. It’s neat to contrast Armstrong and Aldrin’s dreamy observations from the first expedition with those of Harrison Schmitt on the last, but I’d have appreciated better orientation. It can be confusing to leap straight from the famous Apollo 13 near-disaster to another flight’s successful landing on the lunar surface, and that could’ve been avoided with a few simple captions. In the end, this well-regarded documentary contains a wonderful assortment of almost-lost footage that deserves to be preserved forever, but its presentation could’ve use some fine-tuning.