Apollo 11 (2019 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollo 11, the 2019 documentary directed by Todd Douglas Miller, opens not with a narrator's voice but with silence and image: crowds gathering at Launch Complex 39, a Saturn V rocket standing against a Florida sky, and faces of people who knew they were watching history. Miller made a radical choice. No talking heads, no modern recreations, no voice-over to tell the audience what to feel. The film trusts the footage entirely. What makes that possible is a discovery made in May 2017: a cache of previously unreleased 70 mm film, large-format footage of the Apollo 11 mission that had sat unseen in archives for nearly five decades. The questions that discovery raises are immediate. Where had this footage been? Who shot it? And what does it show that the world had not yet seen?

• 2. A Documentary Found

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  In late 2016, Todd Douglas Miller had just finished The Last Steps, a short documentary about Apollo 17, when British archival producer and film editor Stephen Slater raised an idea: make a similarly themed film to mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. CNN Films came aboard as a production partner. What nobody anticipated was what a collaboration with NASA and the National Archives and Records Administration would turn up the following year. In May 2017, that three-way partnership surfaced unreleased 70 mm footage covering the preparation, launch, mission control operations, recovery, and post-flight activities of the Apollo 11 mission. Specialized climate-controlled vans carried the archival reels to and from College Park, Maryland, where Final Frame, a post-production firm in New York City, made high-resolution digital scans of every ground-based reel available in the National Archives. The large-format images captured scenes that no commercial film or television broadcast had ever shown the public: spectators assembled for the launch, the Saturn V ascending, and astronauts recovered alongside the command module Columbia aboard the USS Hornet.

• 3. The Architecture of Immersion

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  Miller built the film around a direct cinema approach, meaning it would show events as they unfolded without editorial commentary layered on top. Beyond the 70 mm footage, the production incorporated 35 mm and 16 mm film, still photography, and closed-circuit television footage. Three wordless biographical sequences, assembled from family photographs and archival footage, sketch the lives of Edwin Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins up to 1969. Animated graphics, designed as line drawings based on the cel-animation in Theo Kamecke's 1971 documentary Moonwalk One, illustrate the mechanical stages of the mission for viewers unfamiliar with how the spacecraft separated and docked. The production team also worked through more than 11,000 hours of audio recordings. Among those recordings were 30-track tapes capturing voice communications from every Mission Control station. Canadian software engineer Ben Feist wrote custom software to improve the fidelity of that newly available audio. Stephen Slater, who had previously synchronized audio with silent 16 mm Mission Control footage on earlier projects, then performed the painstaking task of matching sound to image across all of it. In the Lunar Module voice recordings, the team identified a folk song called "Mother Country" by musician John Stewart, and the song was woven into the finished film.

• 4. Sound Built for 1969

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  Composer Matt Morton faced a constraint that became the film's sonic signature: he used only electronic instruments that existed in 1969. The resulting score was issued as a seventeen-track album, Apollo 11 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), released worldwide by Milan Records for digital download on the 8th of March 2019, on CD on the 28th of June, and on vinyl on the 19th of July. At the 4th Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, the score earned Matt Morton a win for Best Score, a recognition that distinguished his period-instrument approach from conventional documentary music.

• 5. Timeline and Truth

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  The film is built on archival honesty, but it did take at least one liberty with the mission's sequence of events. During the return voyage, on day 8 of the mission at Ground Elapsed Time 179:00:29, Michael Collins's biomedical sensor, his impedance pneumograph, became disconnected. Collins responded with the wisecrack, "I promise to let you know if I stop breathing." In the documentary, that exchange is placed during the approach to the Moon, before the separation of the command module Columbia and the Lunar Module Eagle. The reordering serves a dramatic rhythm, but it is a departure from when the moment actually happened.

• 6. Reception and Awards

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  Apollo 11 premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on the 24th of January 2019, where critics immediately singled out the quality of the footage. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 99 percent of 192 critics' reviews were positive, with an average rating of 8.9 out of 10. On Metacritic, the film scored 88 out of 100 from 35 critics, a result the site classified as indicating universal acclaim. David Ehrlich of IndieWire complimented Miller's ability to make the Moon landing sequence feel unique and thrilling, and wrote that the clarity of the footage "takes your breath away." Glenn Kenny of The New York Times called the film "entirely awe-inspiring" and noted that "although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense." Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film four out of four stars, describing it as "an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill" and writing that films as "completely imagined and ecstatically realized" as this one "make most other movies, even the good ones, seem underachieving." Neon acquired worldwide theatrical distribution rights in July 2018, and the film was released in the United States on the 1st of March 2019. It grossed $15 million at the box office, opening weekend earnings of $1.6 million from 120 IMAX theaters. At the 4th Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, the film won five awards, the most of any title at the ceremony, including Best Documentary Feature. At the 72nd Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, it won three prizes, including Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program, a category in which Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were themselves recognized for the footage they captured during the mission. Universal Pictures released the film for home viewing in the United States on the 14th of May 2019, with a 4K Ultra HD edition following in the United Kingdom on the 4th of November 2019 through Dogwoof, the same distributor that had handled the film's UK theatrical run.