For All Mankind

Space lends itself very well to storytelling. We know precious little about it – despite it holding the key to our origins – and it’s this mystery that fuels the imaginings and ideas of writers, filmmakers, scientists, artists…just about anybody. A fascination with the extraterrestrial, for instance, led the great Stanley Kubrick to make 2001: A Space Odyssey, cinema’s greatest piece of science-fiction, a true masterwork that somehow succeeded in harnessing everything that is awe-inspiring about space: its grandeur, its beauty, its power, its mystique, its possibilities.
When 2001 was released in 1968, the Space Race was nearing its end, with the first moon landing little more than a year away. Russia had become the first ‘space power’ in 1957, launching the first artificial satellites into orbit, an achievement that caused embarrassment for the US and led to the creation of NASA. Not long after becoming President in 1961, John F Kennedy looked for a project that would capture the American public’s imagination, as well as benefit him politically – a lunar landing was seen as the only way to overtake Russia in the race to dominate space exploration. JFK gave a famous speech at Rice University in 1962, in which he talked of a lunar mission being ‘one of the great adventures of all time’.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

It is this speech that begins For All Mankind, Al Reinert’s magnificent documentary on the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Reinert chose to make his film when he discovered that the Apollo astronauts had shot countless hours of footage documenting their missions. (Up until that point, the footage had been held in NASA’s archives without being made available for public viewing.) The images Reinert selected from this treasure trove are simply breathtaking, and seamlessly melded together into a fascinating retelling of one of history's great moments. (Watching For All Mankind, I was reminded of something German director Werner Herzog had suggested in a DVD commentary for one of his own documentaries, Fata Morgana: he said that mankind only has embarrassed images of the world and that we need to find new images with which to define ourselves. What place could be more likely to offer this opportunity than space, a vast and endless world very few of us will get to witness with our own eyes?) Their sheer beauty is further augmented by the narration, which, thankfully, Reinert leaves to the astronauts themselves. Many a documentary has been soured by a lazy celebrity voiceover or a lifeless faux-philosophical reading passed off as genuine insight, so the astronauts’ sharing of their ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences carries particular potency.

A film like this would almost be neglecting its duties if it failed to capture the palpable excitement these missions must have elicited in everyone involved – the astronauts, CAPCOM, the NASA flight controllers – and Reinert's choice of footage contains some truly special moments. These men, the astronauts, were embarking upon adventures that, for them, fulfilled a lifelong dream: they were a culmination of years of training in preparation for an opportunity afforded to very few people, so it’s little wonder that this experience reduced them to an almost childlike state. There are several marvellous sequences to document this: the astronauts’ first encounters with weightlessness; their down time in the shuttle spent listening to tapes of R&B and Merle Haggard; their first steps on the moon where, despite their cumbersome spacesuits, they hop, skip and tumble like marionettes.

Reinert’s film is elegant and glacial, underscored with a haunting soundtrack by Brian Eno (who else?). With the NASA archives at his disposal, Reinert had the finest raw materials with which to work: what he then needed to do was use them to turn out an impeccable product. For All Mankind is certainly that, a great celebration of space, the dreams of men, and a nation dogged in its determination to witness a new world in all its glory.