Greatest Films (and TV) to Watch to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11
The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 is this week. The Saturn V rocket carrying Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin lifted off from Cape Canaveral on July 16, 1969. Neil and Buzz landed on the surface of the Moon on July 20 and the three men landed in the Pacific ocean on July 24, 1969. It was a civilization changing experience. For over 300,000 years, our species has stared up at the Moon and wondered about visiting it. In 1969, just 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first airplane flight, mankind escaped the boundaries of the Earth and set foot on another celestial body, that very Moon.
The program that sent those men to the Moon began with Project Mercury in 1958. Astronauts were selected and over the next decade flew on increasingly more challenging missions as NASA learned how to get to the Moon.
To celebrate this anniversary, I thought we should look at a selection of films, both drama and documentary, that tell the stories of this endeavor. Breaking with blog tradition, rather than a countdown of the ten best films (and two TV series), the films in this post are listed in the best order to watch them.
The Right Stuff (1983) — Philip Kaufman directed and wrote this screenplay, adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book. The film focuses upon the first batch of astronauts, known as the Mercury 7. Wolfe was fascinated by what type of men would choose to be test pilots. His book examines them and included within that set of people were the first astronauts. The film tries to focus on the Mercury 7 astronauts, but often finds itself a little more interested in one of the pilots who wasn’t selected to be an astronaut, Chuck Yeager, wonderfully portrayed by Sam Shepard. Two films in this list have characters perfectly brought to life by actor Ed Harris. In this film, Harris plays astronaut John Glenn, and then in Apollo 13, he plays flight director Gene Kranz.
Hidden Figures (2016) — Behind the scenes of the rocket launches and astronaut derring do, were the engineers that made the missions possible. And behind the scenes of those engineers were a group of women known as “computers”. This film tells the story of three of those women: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. At a time in which they were discriminated against for both their sex and their skin color, they made essential contributions to mankind’s greatest accomplishment.
The Astronaut Wives Club (2015) — This ABC limited television series is based on a book called, wait for it… The Astronaut Wives Club. The book was written by journalist Lily Koppel, based largely on face to face interviews Koppel conducted with the women in question.
The show is not a documentary. It does take a small amount of artistic license to tell its stories in an entertaining and dramatic way, within the scope of the show, and to keep the focus on its primary characters.
Primarily this means that the timeline is massaged in places to allow them to tell complete stories within a single episode and to spread the stories evenly across the episodes. So far, seven episodes have aired and those seven episodes have covered almost eight years of story.
The show is intended to be focused on the wives of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts. It is their story. We are supposed to see things from their perspective — not their husbands’ perspective. So, there are some scenes where a wife performs an action that in reality was performed by a husband.
But, the major plot points are pretty accurate — or at least accurate to the public history. The actors do a good job portraying their characters. The production values are good and the sets look fairly authentic.
Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo (2017) — This wonderful documentary looks at the flight controllers that planned, trained, and flew the Apollo missions. You’ll meet men like John Aaron, Steve Bales, Jerry Bostick, and Sy Liebergot and here about their adventures and their sacrifices.
From the Earth to the Moon (1998) — This fantastic HBO miniseries first aired starting in April, 1998. I had started working at the Johnson Space Center four months earlier. I fondly remembering getting together with a group of fellow new hires and meeting at the apartment of a colleague whom had HBO, to watch this.
The show has been hard to find, over the years, but this month it is being released on Blu-Ray and digital in a remastered high-definition format. All of the visual effects have been recreated with modern technology and the film has been cleaned and restored. I can’t wait to see it.
First Man (2018) — This film is a beautiful, immersive, and powerful experience. Never has the experience of being in a spacecraft been so experientially depicted. The scene depicting the Gemini-Agena post-rendezvous of Gemini 8 has incredible verisimilitude. I don’t think I breathed once during that scene. Director Damien Chazelle has put together a heart-wrenching portrait of Neil Armstrong. Robert Frost’s answer to What is your review of “First Man” (2018 film)?
Armstrong (2019) — A wonderful tribute to the man who represented all of us when he took that small step for man and giant leap for mankind. This documentary is a survey of most of Neil Armstrong’s life. After watching First Man, many of the events should feel familiar, but here they are described by the people involved. Harrison Ford narrates the words of Neil Armstrong, taken from letters and interviews. I found this film very emotionally impacting. Armstrong lived an incredible life full of adventure, tragedy, and triumph.
The Dish (2000) — Sam Neill stars in this Australian comedy that looks at the contribution Australians at the Parkes Observatory made in getting the live video of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the Moon to television viewers all around the world.
Apollo 11 (2019) — a stunningly beautiful multimedia experience. Director Todd Douglas Miller and his team weaved together this engrossing telling of the Apollo 11 mission, using newly remastered film footage and audio. There is no film narrator. The stories are told by the people as they told them then, over the communications loops and via the media broadcasts.
Apollo 13 (1995) — Eight months after Apollo 11, a third mission to the Moon launched. Three days into the mission, a liquid oxygen tank exploded, crippling the spacecraft and propelling the crew and flight controllers into an amazing effort to bring the crew safely back to Earth. Ron Howard directed this film and brought together a fantastic cast that includes Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris. We all know how the story ends, but Howard fills the film with tension and suspense. As many times as I’ve watched it, there are still scenes where I hold my breath.
Last Man on the Moon (2014) — In December 1972, the last of the twelve men to walk on the Moon climbed back into his spacecraft and left the lunar surface. That man was Gene Cernan and this documentary examines his life. I had the great fortune to spend a day with Gene Cernan a few years before this documentary was made.
Chasing the Moon (2019) — This almost six hour documentary was told in three parts, on the PBS series American Experience. The film is written and directed by documentarian Robert Stone. It is an exhaustive — in the best way — examination of how we got to the Moon, starting with the German scientists recruited into Operation Paperclip, at the end of WWII. There’s a lot of great footage I hadn’t seen before.
