I loved First Man when I watched it in the cinema a couple of years ago but do I really need to watch a documentary of the same events? It turned out that yes, even though it covers much of the same ground, the excellent editing here and the use of previously unseen archival footage makes this well worth watching for space fans and adds much of value even to those who are already familiar with the moon landing.

This documentary focuses purely on the Apollo 11 mission itself beginning hours before the launch, through the entirety of the flight and ending with the recovery of the spacecraft as well as immediate post-mission reactions. The quality of the images is superb especially that from the previously unreleased, high resolution 70 mm film. Combined with that are extensive voice recordings of the mission control stations that have been cleaned to make it easier to understand what is being said. The result is extraordinarily effective at making you feel what it was like to be part of the crowd in 1969, eagerly watching the television screens and listening to the radio broadcasts as the whole world focused its attention on this one event. Also great is the sense of time passing as the entire mission between launch and recovery lasted eight days in total. While dramatizations tend to skip over the dead time between key events, I loved how this collection of footage included such trivialities as the changing of shifts at mission control and the astronauts coming on duty in the morning. It’s another way of keeping it real and capturing the moment as it was.

First Man was of course a beautiful and amazingly well made film but it struck me watching this that real life still outdoes imagination in both scale and level of detail. When the camera pans across mission control and you see the seemingly endless banks of control stations and computers and the accompanying engineers and technicians, it really drives home the enormity of the effort that it took to send three people to the moon and the untold numbers of people who worked hard to make it all happen. Then add to that the huge crowds camped outside in their RVs all waiting to catch the tiniest glimpse of the Saturn V rocket far away and you realize how many more people have their hopes and dreams riding on this one event. No crowd generating algorithm could replicate the variety and eclectic zaniness of the assembled masses there and if a fictional film tried to show the ridiculous amount of equipment and kit that we see here it would be disbelieved as being preposterous. I think the best bits of this documentary are the moments just before the launch and the launch itself as the sense of anticipation is so powerful as to be aching. Every trivial detail, such as the moment when the astronauts step out of the building and exactly how long it takes for the bus they ride to take them to the rocket, turns into a news item that people await with bated breath.

During the flight itself, it is notable how this presentation understates the most iconic moments, such as Armstrong delivering his famous first words on the Moon, in favor of lesser known details. This includes the astronauts expressing astonishment at the fineness of the grains of soil on the surface of the Moon and hence how easily footprints are left behind with every step they take or how they had to orbit the Moon a full thirteen times before initiating the landing procedure. Then they also show how the world starts to lose interest during the trip back to Earth as the news is dominated by Ted Kennedy’s car accident, which is exactly what you’d expect. But then interest picks up again as the capsule nears the Earth and the tension is incredible when communications is cut off during reentry. The film doesn’t neglect how even the recovery of the astronauts and the capsule is a major effort involving the mobilization of the carrier USS Hornet as you watch them scramble planes to look out for the arriving spacecraft and see crowds surging on the flight deck.

All this is to say that even if you’re already familiar with nearly every detail of the Apollo 11 mission, watching this remains an invaluable and unparalleled experience. Director Todd Douglas Miller’s intent is not to educate the public with hard facts that can more easily be read about elsewhere but to bring to life the incredible events and make you feel as if you were immersed in the moment. The only failing that I can think of is that while the commentators at the time do remark that the whole world is watching, we only ever see things from the American point of view and it would have been nice if you could have had some non-American perspectives from that period as well. Still this is a great documentary and I consider a must watch for any space fan.