Apollo 11

OK, so, Apollo 11. I saw the movie last night a bit belatedly. It was great. Space nerds everywhere and probably also everyone else should see it. It's almost entirely primary source footage from the actual mission, and some of it is really stunning. I didn't realize their cameras were so good!

That said I also felt a little ... let down? I think it managed to inadvertently sell the mission, and the whole Apollo program, short. The movie spans more-or-less only and exactly the mission itself, so you don't get to see any of the backstory, the training, the effort that went into it. And the mission, of course, goes off nearly flawlessly. Even the harrowing landing, of Armstrong piloting the LM down to a landing with ~15s of fuel to spare, while the AGC was throwing off 1202 and 1201 errors being frantically diagnosed from the ground, was over in maybe 60 seconds (because that's how long it took!) and looks strained but routine. And as watchers 50 years hence, of course we know the ending so there's no real suspense.

The real magic, the real fascination of the Apollo program, at least for me, is in the backstories, in the buildups, in the sheer amount of preparation and planning that went on on the ground to make it go that smoothly, so that when the computer threw off that error and they had a few seconds to make a call, there was a specific person sitting on the loop with a hand-written list of all the error code, what they meant, and what they meant for the mission, at hand and ready to respond, with CAPCOM ready to relay the answer to Eagle so there was no confusion about communication channels.

But on another level, maybe the movie makes exactly that point. Apollo 11 was an almost unbelievable achievement, an incredibly daring and technically challenging mission, and the fact that the execution of the mission itself did look almost routine and scripted is a testament to the depth of work and training and test runs and analysis that went into it, so that we could do this impossible-seeming task and make it routine. And also if you're looking for it, you get glimpses of the sheer human scale of the endeavor throughout the film, in the dozens or hundreds of people in the control rooms, in Gene Kranz going around the horn and all the controllers calling off their "GO"s in carefully planned orchestration. Everything goes smoothly -- almost to the point the monotony at points -- but you can always look and see just. how. much. work and planning is hovering just behind the scenes in order to make it look that easy.