Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller, 2019) (Patreon)

Theirs is to win / If it kills them / They're just humans / With wives and children . . .

A beautiful real-life companion piece -slash- corrective to the fictionalizations of First Man, Miller's Apollo 11 is a no-frills piece of nonfiction filmmaking because it lets the footage tell the tale. Comprised almost exclusively of NASA's own documentation of the preparation for and execution of the trip to the moon, Apollo 11 can be slow-going at times, if you aren't already captivated by its subject matter. Miller and his team make no attempt to seduce the viewer with grandiose voiceover or contextual stage-setting. The importance of what we are seeing is simply, understandably assumed, and so often the film feels less like a deliberate work of nonfiction cinema than a time capsule, an audiovisual file folder containing all the available material on the given topic.

In its own impressive way, Apollo 11, shares certain traits with otherwise very different documentaries like Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old and the recent film on Jane Goodall, Jane. Like those efforts, Apollo 11 trades on the sheer miraculousness of what we are seeing, the precision and clarity with which analogue cinema was able to capture momentous events in a crisp indexical detail that today's digital imagery simply doesn't have. So we see and hear Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins as flesh-and-blood men rather than as historical icons, and we witness the massive team behind their journey, as a group and as select individuals.

So if I have a quibble with Apollo 11, it's only that it feels less like a "film" per se than an archive. In this respect it is invaluable, but I found that watching it could, at times, feel like reading an entire encyclopedia entry, albeit a stunningly illustrated one. The fact that this is currently the most acclaimed documentary of 2019 is curious. It seems to suggest that we as a society (and film critics, as a profession) feel ourselves drowning in ugly, overbearing bias, and its dialectical opposite, those meta / pomo hybrid films that undermine their own authority. Apollo 11 is nothing but authority, clad in the reassuring vestments of universal fact.

But then, at a time when you have buffoons who deny this ever happened, or refute its absolute evidence of a spherical earth, maybe you really do have to just play it clean.

Also, this.