Beyond the Multiplex

"In the Shadow of the Moon": The men who visited another world talk about God, death and the universe
I was a small child when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got out of their lunar module and walked on the moon in the summer of 1969. But not too small to say something snotty when my father expressed amazement at what we were watching on his tiny J.C. Penney black-and-white television, which was wedged on the nightstand in my parents' bedroom.

It's too late to apologize now, Dad. But you were right, of course. David Sington's marvelous documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" helps to recapture much of the awe and enthusiasm that Americans -- and, hell, everybody else too -- once felt about the space program. Sure, NASA's push to the moon was motivated largely by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union (and also by mystical loyalty to the murdered John F. Kennedy), but even if you believe it was a prodigious waste of money it was also an extraordinary accomplishment.

As Sington's film demonstrates, the handful of men who flew to the moon in glorified aluminum cans, using jury-rigged late-'60s computer technology that rarely worked as advertised, went there for reasons that can only seem noble and innocent -- and entirely too distant -- today. Halliburton didn't exist yet, so the whole project was actually run by the government, and not subcontracted at grossly inflated prices. There was nationalism involved, but not much jingoism, and the astronauts themselves quickly grasped that this was a human accomplishment, not merely an American one. There's heart-stoppingly beautiful footage from the various moon missions in "In the Shadow of the Moon," much of it never seen outside NASA archives, but Sington's central idea is much simpler and more profound than recapitulating a well-known history.

Most of the surviving astronauts have built subsequent careers out of their lunar voyages, and may feel sick of recounting their adventures. (Neil Armstrong, for instance, rarely participates in public events, and is not interviewed here.) Sington asks these men, now in or near the last chapters of their lives, to reflect on the private meanings of their unparalleled experiences: What did being on the moon actually feel like? What thoughts ran through their mind when they were up there? How do they feel about being the only humans ever to visit another world? How has it changed (if it has changed) their sense of life on Earth and its ultimate significance?

It's a fascinating excursion into the minds of a group of well-educated but necessarily pragmatic men who have shared an extraordinary, and literally transcendent, experience. Aldrin, an aeronautics wonk whose principal mission concerns were questions of orbit and trajectory, says that when he was on the moon, looking back at Earth, he observed that science and technology had gotten him there, but were utterly inadequate to what he was thinking and feeling.

If Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke found that his moon journey was a pathway toward Christian belief -- "My walk on the moon was a great adventure," he says, "but my walk with Jesus goes on forever" -- Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, himself an aeronautical engineer, went in a different direction. He describes an ecstatic, semi-Gnostic moment of mystical communion with the universe, when he realized that the molecules of his own body had been formed somewhere out there, in the engine of a distant star. (Neither the film nor its Web site mentions that Mitchell is now a well-known UFO believer and researcher into paranormal phenomena. If anybody can make you take those things seriously, he can.)

Most of the other astronauts interviewed fall somewhere between those extremes, but they all seem aware that the moon shots had a significance on Earth that nobody could quite grasp at the time. If nothing else, they gave us an acute and startling vision of our own world, so precious, fragile and beautiful compared to the sterile, desert-like moon. "Earthrise," the legendary photo snapped from Apollo 8 as it orbited the moon, became an image that changed history; it was and remains one of the environmental movement's most potent symbols.

Michael Collins, the charming and unassuming character who became famous as the man who accompanied Aldrin and Armstrong all the way to the moon on Apollo 11 without setting foot on the surface, claims he wasn't lonely during his solo orbit voyage around the fabled "dark side," traveling through pitch black and out of radio contact. He kept the lights on and music playing, he says. It did occur to him, though, that on that big blue globe there were 3 billion people, with two more on the dead gray world below him. On his side of the moon, he jokes, "There was just me -- and God knows what." It's a spine-tingling moment in a film full of wonders.

"In the Shadow of the Moon" opens Sept. 7 in New York and Los Angeles; Sept. 14 in Boston, Chicago and Washington; and Sept. 21 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Hartford, Conn., Houston, New Haven, Conn., Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Austin, Texas, with many more cities to follow.

Next page: Paul Auster's latest; Al Pacino cruises