Sundance 2019: Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary uses original footage of the moon mission that sometimes seems too vivid and too visceral to have come from the vaults
Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong didn’t quite engage with moviegoers last fall, with Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” limping to about $45 million at the box office and failing to land an Oscar Best Picture nomination.
But what about Neil Armstrong as Neil Armstrong?
That’s what you get with “Apollo 11,” which uses actual footage from the NASA mission that first landed a man on the moon. The film is one of the opening-night documentaries at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, offering a less enveloping but fully captivating look at the mission whose 50th anniversary will arrive in July of this year.
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In a way, it’s unfair to compare “Apollo 11” to “First Man” — but given the timing, it’s also unavoidable. So while Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary doesn’t delve into the famously unemotional Armstrong’s private life, and while it doesn’t deliver the you-are-there feeling you get from the symphony of cockpit creaks, rumbles and roars in Chazelle’s film, it substitutes something just as powerful: the knowledge that we’re seeing what actually happened.
Some of the footage looks familiar, as of course it would in any telling of a story that was so widely documented and so endlessly rewatched.
