Apollo 11 Documentary Coming

This year is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing and there will be a documentary about Apollo 11 featuring "new" footage. NASA hired an MGM film crew to film the preparations for the launch and the mission, but most of the 70 mm. footage has languished in storage until recently. A documentary using the footage was shown at the Sundance Festival and it sounds incredible.

Buzz Aldrin himself is one of a dozen credited cinematographers on the new documentary, and based on early reviews coming from Sundance last week, it appears that the level of intimacy the crew captured is the film’s biggest strength. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “much of the footage in Apollo 11 is, by virtue of both access and proper preservation, utterly breathtaking,” and found that the filmmakers were freed up to make something experiential because the story of the mission is already so well known. Indiewire gushed that “the clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”

 If the trailer (linked above) is any indication, this is going to be a must see for anyone with the slightest interest in space exploration.