This is not the AppleTV show; it’s a documentary about America’s manned trips to the moon (Apollos 8 through 17, so the five year period from 1968 to 1972). But it’s not the kind of documentary that assembles all kinds of behind the scenes details to paint a comprehensive picture of how the programs ran and who the people in them were — it’s basically just a bunch of film from the missions, voiced over by astronauts saying mostly banal things about how cool space is and how weird it is to look at earth far away, backed by a Brian Eno soundtrack.

Which is tbh a little weird, now that I think about it. I was kind of under the impression that this was made shortly after the Apollo program ended, so was almost a primary source, a chance to get that footage out to the public. But actually it’s from 1989, apparently tied to the 20th anniversary of the moon landing. But… it is still basically a primary source, and apparently was the first time much of this footage was broadly available. The director, Al Reinert, found out that NASA had a bunch of footage that astronauts had shot in space and on the moon, stuff that looked better than the TV broadcasts that people saw during the missions, and had just filed it away without ever doing anything with it, and that’s where the project originated. (Fun link: Siskel & Ebert review the laserdisc release, with a comment about how high quality the footage is. I suspect it looks better on the 4K disc I watched it on, although most of it is 16mm footage, so maybe not that much better.)

Structurally, the film melds all the different missions together into a kind of composite, with e.g. footage of astronauts from different missions all walking out to the rocket, and then launch footage from several launches, and so on as it follows all the missions to the moon and down to the surface. (Apollo 13’s misfortunes get like 30 seconds of “oh shit, seems bad… whew, got it fixed.”) This disc had optional subtitles identifying who people were; I think without those subtitles, I genuinely would have assumed it was all a single mission, rather than realizing that they were dudes from multiple missions. I wonder if astronauts were so famous in 1989 that the audience just would have recognized people’s faces without those subtitles?

The most amusing thing to me is how heavily the experiences of the astronauts were mediated by movies: At multiple places in the movie, different astronauts make 2001 references — one of them is playing Also Sprach Zarathustra on a tape player that’s floating in zero-g, and another talks about flying over the moon’s surface as being “2001 type stuff.” It cracks me up that someone doing an activity that only like a dozen people have ever done in all of human history is like “oh man, just like in that movie!”

Also amusing is how much fucking around the astronauts do. They dick around with stuff in zero g (some of it is clearly for Earth audiences, but not all) and then have fun bunny hopping around on the moon, too. To some extent, this is very humanizing: I too would fuck around in space (if I weren’t too busy being sick, which is tbh more likely). But to some extent, I think it illustrates why we didn’t bother going back after 1972 — they’re sort of idly picking up rocks to bring back for study, but by that point, it’s pretty clear that there aren’t going to be any major scientific discoveries out of it, this was just a cool, very expensive, trip for a couple of tourists.

A surprising thing about the documentary is that while it does show the last man on the moon leaving the surface and saying his rehearsed last words, it doesn’t get elegiac about it. There’s no voiceover about how we never went back or how they hope someday maybe we’ll return or whatever, it’s just a thing that happened. Maybe at that point it didn’t feel that long ago, and people still thought we might someday go back? (That last moon landing would have been 17 years in the past then, so like something in 2005 from today. I guess I wouldn’t necessarily assume that something we last did in 2005 was never happening again.)

Anyway, bonus weird thing that I learned from Wikipedia: The film’s title comes from the plaque that the Apollo 11 bros littered onto the moon, which mentions coming in peace for all mankind (a line I can’t even type without mentally setting to the music from John Adams’ Nixon in China), but then in this movie they edited a JFK speech that says “for all people” to say “for all mankind” so it worked better with the title. Who alters a speech in a documentary?!?

End of the day, this isn’t like a mind-blowing revelation of a documentary but if you like space shit, it’s worth a watch.