Todd Douglas Miller’s new documentary, “Apollo 11,” is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore.
The documentary “Apollo 11” — playing in select IMAX theaters now, before opening more widely in regular cinemas on Friday — is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space exploration. The director Todd Douglas Miller and a team of archivists and editors found rare footage of the original manned lunar landing mission, and compiled it into a film that’s an immersive and inspiring record of the voyage, from launch to splashdown.
But “Apollo 11” is far from the only great documentary about humanity’s efforts to explore beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The “space doc” is a small but fertile nonfiction cinema subgenre, populated by filmmakers who often partner with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to combine astonishing images with recollections from the small handful of men and women who have dared to venture to the stars.
[Read our review of “Apollo 11,” a Times Critic’s Pick]
Here are five of the best of these movies, and how to stream them.
How to watch: Stream it on Kanopy; buy or rent it on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
The gold standard for NASA documentaries, this Oscar-nominated 1989 film is rich with the alien wonder of a trip to the moon. The director Al Reinert was granted access to footage shot by astronauts during the various Apollo missions, and he and his editors (led by Susan Korda) cut them into an approximation of a single voyage, with a focus on scenes that are eerie and awe-inspiring. With its score by the ambient music pioneers Brian Eno, Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois — and its narration provided by the original Mission Control audio recordings, combined with reflective astronaut interviews — “For All Mankind” evokes the grand science-fiction adventure of Apollo.
