Apollo: Missions to the Moon

One of the many fine documentaries on Disney Plus now "Apollo. Mission to the Moon" is one of the few films in this genre that had bit of buzz around it when it was released. Finally seeing it now, I can appreciate what an impressive achievement it is.

Veteran documentary maker Tom Jennings weaves together the story of the Apollo Space programme, NASA's attempts to beat the USSR in completing a manned Lunar expedition. The documentary is done entirely without narration, but by cutting together library footage, recordings made within the NASA buildings and interview from associated broadcasters.

It's really impressive how well that conceit works and how clearly the story is told without the use of narration or direct to camera interviews. There is, perhaps naturally, a lot of focus given to the 11th and 13th missions, given that those are the ones with the best stories. There is a respectful amount of time given to the disaster that befell the crew of Apollo one, who unfortunately were killed on a training exercise. I would say that comes at the expense of a few of the other missions, particularly the later ones that, If I'm honest, I couldn't even have told you what they were for.

There's a lot of films about the Apollo series, there's a lot of them just on Disney plus but in terms of cinematic achievement, few can match this story.

For the most part, this was an enjoyable and unusual documentary about the Apollo program. Rather than the usual video with voiceover narration, this was made up entirely of clips of educational films, news broadcasts, TV shows, and other varied sources. In doing so, the filmmakers have made a film that really captures the feel of those few years.

However, one can only wonder if they thought they were going to have a third hour in which to tell the story. After studying in excellent detail the development of the rocket and the growth of the program, culminating in the first manned lunar landing by Apollo 11, the remainder of the program is extremely rushed, almost disrespectfully so. The Apollo 12 mission is covered in less than THREE minutes, most of which is devoted to the fact that one of the video cameras was accidentally damaged. The Apollo 13 mission gets slightly better treatment, with 18 minutes of video covering their story, but after a final commercial break, there are only eight minutes left to tell the stories of Apollo 14, 15, 16, and 17. As short as that is, they use a total of only SIX minutes for those four missions, and then waste the final two minutes of a documentary supposedly about Apollo on beauty shots of the space shuttle and International Space Station. (I guess Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz were left on the cutting room floor.)

Maybe this was intended as a two-hour theater release, and the flippant treatment of everything after Apollo 11 reflects edits made to the run time so that 26 minutes of commercials could be shoe-horned in for broadcast. THAT would have been an 8-star or even 9-star documentary, and I would hope a director's cut will someday be released on DVD (Blu-ray would be a waste, considering most of the video is from late-60s / early-70s TV anyway.)

But as it is, I'll give eight stars to the first 63 minutes, and the final 31minutes the three stars it barely deserves. Overall, this is no more than a six.