People walked on the moon. Walked
on the moon. It sounds like science
fiction, but it’s history—40-years-gone
history. Outside the living memory of
many, many people now alive (including
me, who wouldn’t make her debut on the
planet till a month after Neil Armstrong’s
famous first step on that dusty rock). That’s
... weird, especially to someone like me
who’d give anything for a trip off the planet
and can’t stand to see our tentative efforts
to move out into space relegated to a historical
footnote.
But I have my movies. My documentaries and near-documentaries about that time, my fictional stories about how the moon shot inspired people. Good thing, too, because I can just about barely hope to live long enough to see a human from Earth set foot again on the Moon, never mind on Mars.
I don’t think it’s at all bizarre, come to think of it, that Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995) is one of my favorite movies ever, and maybe—if I can manage to be objective about it—one of the best movies of the latter half of the 20th century. Sure, it’s about an event that could have been one of the most unsettling disasters in human history; it chills me to think that the astronauts on this doomed lunar mission could have ended up as frozen corpses orbiting the moon to this day, or could have skipped off the Earth’s atmosphere on their tricky return only to go sailing off into deep space on an irretrievable trajectory. But Howard’s depiction of the triumphant averting of tragedy is journalistically straightforward in style while deeply, un-schmaltzily emotional in its execution.
Even better, Apollo 13 so inspired star
Tom Hanks—clearly a space geek after my
own heart—that he went on to produce the
1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the
Moon, a 12-part look at some of the previously
unsung work that went into putting
men on the moon. My favorite episode? No.
10, “Galileo Was Right,” in which a geologist
turns a bunch of flyboy jock astronauts
into rockhounds of the first degree. (See?
Science can be exciting!)
Hanks also produced the IMAX movie
Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon,
which—diminished as it is on DVD—is
worth seeing for its showcasing of original
footage of the moon walks. Ditto some of
the many, many other documentaries—the
stuff of science cable channels—dedicated
to the hardcore geekery of the moon landings.
The new Discovery Channel release
Moon Machines covers the massive Saturn V
booster, the building of the Lunar Module,
the challenges of navigating in space, and
more. For a foreign look at how the first
moon landing played out, the BBC production
Apollo 11: A Night to Remember offers
rare archival news footage from July 1969.
What about the men—and they were,
sadly, all men; no women have walked on
the moon—who took those
historic footsteps? In the
Shadow of the Moon (2007)
offers bittersweet reminiscences
of the Apollo astronauts
(guess who took a
moment for a pee while he
was descending from the
Lunar lander?). The Right
Stuff (1983) has not yet
been bested as the most
poignant, most exciting,
most entertaining look at
the men who rode the earliest
rockets. It also clearly
inspired both the charmingly
goofy Space Cowboys
(2000), in which a bunch of
old-fart rocket jockeys take off for one last
mission, and 2006’s The Astronaut Farmer,
in which a modern wannabe hearkens back
to the pioneering days of space travel (and
classic Heinlein-esque science fiction!) by
building his own backyard rocket.
We can still look back, too, at one of the
first examples of how the moon stirred
the artistic imagination which happens to
be one of the first examples of cinema as
well Georges Mélies’ 1902 short “A Trip to
the Moon” is available on the DVD Mélies
the Magician—and it serves as a reminder
that the Moon has never, truly, been so far
away.