'In The Shadow of the Moon'
reviewed by Martin McGrath

For the first time, watching In The Shadow Of The Moon, I came to a sort of understanding about why some people are so convinced that the Apollo landings were a giant hoax. Looking back on it from our wealthier but infinitely more fearful times, the whole Apollo project seems like an impossible dream.

Normally I take notes throughout a movie, scribbling down little quotes, recording my impressions.

My notes for In The Shadow Of The Moon stop after I wrote this down this snippet from a speech by JFK:

“We shall send to the moon, two hundred and forty thousand miles away, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over twenty-five thousand miles per hour causing a heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun (almost as hot as it is here today) and do all this and do it right and do it first before this decade is out. We must be bold.”

Now, friends, try and imagine a modern politician saying those words – imagine them suggesting just a project ‘made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented’ and if you can imagine that, try to imagine not only that a politician says it but that when it is said the reaction of the press and the public is not howling laughter and name-calling but pride and a sense of unified purpose. The modern press would roar with laughter.

And suddenly you realise that the Apollo programme simply cannot have happened in this reality.

And then there are the men who flew to the moon.

These are stoic, straightforward men who can talk about moments of terrible disaster and towering achievement in the same flat tones, who all seem to share the same dry wit and who accept their unique place in history with a wry contentment. Nothing could be further from the modern ‘celebrity’ who clamour for every scrap of media attention when their greatest achievement is to have slept with a footballer (or have slept with someone who once slept with a footballer).

Take, for one example, this little intercut piece featuring Charlie Duke and John Young, astronauts on Apollo Sixteen, talking about the excitement and the fear that came with sitting on top of 300 foot of rocket as it blasted off:

Then try to imagine if the cretins on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here could summon half of the same sang froid. Bush tucker challenge my arse.

The idea that the two groups of people belong to the same species, were dragged dripping from the same gene pool, seems extraordinary. There are generations of people for whom nothing from the face of a distant planet could be as alien as the Apollo astronauts.

Watching this film, I was again and again reminded of the lines from Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”:

That ‘lonely impulse of delight’ flickers again and again in the eyes of these now old men when they recall the deeds of their youth. For example, when Alan Dean – a test pilot – recounts the day he made his decision to apply for the astronaut corps:

“I thought I had the best job in the world, from the day I entered flight training, until I looked on TV one day and Al Shepard goes up in a rocket. He's gone higher than I've ever gone, and faster than I've ever gone, and most importantly, he's made more noise doing it. He's even on TV doing it. How do I get that job?”

Or when they talk about the impact of seeing the Earth from the surface of the moon, or of riding a bucking rocket out of the Earth’s atmosphere, or the flaming ferocity of re-entry. There’s never any doubt that these men would do it all again at the drop of a hat. And no doubt that what they did was more than just Cold War propaganda but the kind of deed that defines mankind.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a simple documentary – stock footage interspersed with talking heads. That the talking heads belong to all (except the sadly absent Neil Armstrong) the surviving Apollo astronauts and that the stock footage recounts what remains the most striking adventure in the history of man’s exploration of this universe means, of course, that no flash gimmickry is needed – or wanted.

By simply retelling the story in the simplest of terms, director Sington succeeds in creating a document that is genuinely capable of making a viewer reassess their own life and what they’ve done with it. This is a story everyone should here again.