Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

romanorum1 The movie is a documentary, a chronicle of about nine NASA missions to the moon from 1968 to 1972, including the near disaster of Apollo 13 ("Houston, we had a problem here."). It is not important that there is not a great focus on any one particular space mission. After all, even if not exactly alike, the trips were similar. But how about those brave men, sitting atop a 300+ foot spaceship longer than the height of the Statue of Liberty . . . waiting for the rocket motors to blast-off . . . a big candle indeed! To make this wonderful movie, director Al Reinert mulled over six million feet of film and taped more than 80 hours of NASA interviews. Editor Susan Korda must have had much work to do.It all began in 1962 with President Kennedy's famous Texas speech. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." We had a supporting array of brilliant engineers at Houston. Our achievement was monumental.The film offers no professional narrative, no texts, and no talking heads. None of those are needed. Instead the story is told by Houston and the astronauts themselves. The footage speaks for itself. And it is beautifully set to music by Brian Eno. An astronaut plays Frank Sinatra's 1964 rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon." How apropos! Later we hear "The eagle has landed." What an experience: walking and hopping on the moon, rock hunting, securing the American flag! One of the astronauts tests Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies using a hammer and a feather. The Italian physicist was right! The film is dedicated to the 14 men and women who died. They include four Russians on two Soyuz missions, and the three astronauts who died in that terrible Apollo I fire in January 1967. Also there were the seven who perished in the Challenger in January 1986.I noticed that the end movie credit of Santo and Johnny Farina's 1959 top instrumental hit reads "Sleepwalking" instead of "Sleep Walk." But the movie version is the cover by Lee DeCarlo (who was also the film's post-production sound supervisor) and also Peter Manning Robinson. Maybe this version was renamed; it certainly does sound like the original Farina tune."For All Mankind" is recommended for everybody!

Cosmoeticadotcom An aspect of this film that lends it uniqueness, is that it is, in a sense, a pure documentary- just the images and words of those involved. It has no political nor philosophical; agenda. Too much agitprop has infected documentaries of recent years. A Certain Kind Of Death is perhaps the only recent documentary I can think of that trusts its audience to this extent. Susan Korda, the film's editor, also deserves notice. It is truly rare that in any film (fictive or documentary) editing plays such a key role, but this is one, and it is not in the length of the particular scenes and how they are edited, but in which images and scenes are in the film, and what other ones (and words- culled from hours of astronaut interviews) they are juxtaposed with. A really great job, and not a wasted second in the film, right from the opening shot of President John F. Kennedy's tossing down of the gauntlet in a speech at Baylor University to the final shots of the missions in flight. Brian Eno's score is also noteworthy.Of course, the only negative thing concerning this film is nothing of its own doing; it is the waste of decades since. Cernan, in the commentary, speaks of sometimes feeling that President Kennedy actually reached into this century, and forcefully willed NASA to the moon decades ahead of time, and I am forced to agree. The tepidity of the public to intellectual and artistic pursuits is only emphasized by witnessing folk, from not too long ago, who treated such ideas as ideals to be cherished and nourished, not dismissed. The moon landing is one of those rare instances where a single act literally changed mankind's view of itself, yet, it did not change enough of it to fundamentally better us all. That fault is society's, not the men and women who achieved this monumental thing. And hats off to Al Reinert for taking up a task even NASA did not feel a need doing, and doing it so well. Simply put, whether a fan of Criterion, documentaries, history, or science, this DVD is one of the few essential films to treasure and explore. If only those political hacks who fund NASA understood exploration and the value of knowledge, perhaps we'd already have had our Martian Apollos and Armstrong. One can still dream little boy dreams now and again, eh?

tedg This was effective for this viewer. Usually what that means in cases like this is that it made me cry. The hook is that it reviews its subject through the eyes of the astronauts. I was wary of this. I got involved in the program later, during the beginning of the shuttle era and even then the astronauts were pretty much there only to have been taken there. They were chosen — some of them — for how good they looked on newsprint. The magic of the program and its heroes were a few visionaries and an army of competent engineers. Yet it was effective because we see the story through the eyes of witnesses. There role here is simply as witness, and if you were alive during this time, you will be impressed at how it affects you.There were all sorts of paths that could have been followed in this. The quest of man to explore; the mysteries of the unknown; the vast game being played by two enemies to demonstrate superiority of ideology; the hidden weapons programs.They cover all these slightly except that last, and that's excusable because these witnesses saw none of that. But the story that dominates is the Kennedy one. Its hard to imagine today, but we loved our president and he deserved it. He was intelligent and articulate. His advisers came off not as louts or bullies, but men (and a few women) smart enough for difficult times. He was the Peace Corps president. Kennedy promised to go to the moon and return without consulting anyone at NASA, and riding on the crest of a national enthusiasm for science and hardware. The nation really was engaged. And then he was killed, and with our rising self-doubt (Vietnam, race) we decided that as a people we owed it to him, or what he stood for. So when it happened, and the world watched, re affirmed the man and what he stood for. It was a good feeling, not pride as much as wonder about who we discovered ourselves to be.This will evoke that same feeling again, the original tears, followed by tears of disappointment at the massive collapse of esteem which followed. A serious of botched opportunities to be worthy of the accomplishment.Its an effective documentary in that regard, all the more so since everything was designed to be photographed, and was. If you really want to learn of this program, you need to go elsewhere, But this delivers on the promise.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Scott W. Larson I won't reiterate all of the praise of this film except to say that if I had just few more spare dollars when it was released on laserdisc, I would have bought a laserdisc player just for this title (and 2001). Fortunately years later I've already purchased a DVD player and For All Mankind has finally been released on that format.To me the defining moment of this film is the lunar lander slowly returning to the command module. At first we only see the cratered surface of the Moon moving below at incredible speed. Then we see a tiny motionless speck above it. Was it a defect in the lens? Of course not. It's the lunar lander slowly returning from the surface. It seems to take much longer than it really does because there are no cuts and no narrator explaining what we already know we're seeing. There's only a dot turning into a space ship. What more could you add to this amazing sight?