In the Shadow of the Moon

It has been thirty-five years, and many space adventure movies have come and gone, since men last stepped on the moon. Yet in David Sington’s new documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, the experience has never seemed so vivid and so untouchable to those of us stranded on Earth.

Assembled from NASA’s highly protected archives of original footage shot by Apollo astronauts, the film traces the history of the Apollo program and its mad dash to top the Russians and fulfill the late President Kennedy’s imposing challenge.

However, this film is no drab, history-class timeline. Instead, Sington builds the film on the hypnotic, high-grain, Technicolor-tinged images shot by the astronauts as well as the astronauts’ own reflections on the experience, years later, with enough distance from the past to pour their hearts out.

The astronauts display a variety of reactions to their experience: some come home believing Jesus Christ as their lord, and some come back believing in a higher order than what Earth’s religions offer. A few confessed to unprecedented fears, whereas others sucked up the thrills of oblivion like a sponge. All of them, however, seem to be forever changed, now aliens on what once felt like home.

Though Sington drops in the occasional joke on pop culture naivete, and lightly contrasts the cultural transformation of the mid-sixties with the astronauts’ buzz cuts and discipline, he mostly stays out of the way, and lets you disappear into what becomes an expressionistic wash of images, never intended for human eyes.

-Mike Hobart

In the Shadow of the Moon
Director: David Sington
100 Minutes, Discovery Films
www.intheshadowofthemoon.com
Opened 9/7/07 in limited US release