Harockerce What a beautiful movie!

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

bruce-barrett-662-807730 Director Richard Dale managed to shoot only Whites. One Black astronaut slipped through in passing. 0ne woman technician, a blond knockout, made the cut. No Black technicians were shown, male or female. Ironically, the narrator spouts a line when the Apollo missions were beginning, that the time for calculations is over, ironic in the light of the recent Margot Lee Shetterly book and 20th Century Fox film, "Hidden Figures," which tells the story of the essential calculations accomplished for years by NASA's "Colored Girls," as they were known at the time. Dale even managed to exclude Blacks from the decades of fascinated onlookers at launches, landings, tragedies, and successes.

antimatter33 I guess the title says it all. Why do space documentaries have to be so bad? Of all the ones ever made, I can only think of a few that are anything but irritating. I was there, I remember. And the music! God who writes this stuff? This particular attempt fails on every level. It fails as history, it fails as nostalgia, it fails as entertainment. The filmmaking technique is amateurish - poor film to video transfer, poor editing, poor choice of material. But the main thing is that it is somehow viscerally irritating. Of the list of things that do not need any window dressing, the Space Race must be on top. So one wonders how, again and again and again, documentary filmmakers manage to get it so wrong. Don't waste time on this turkey - see "In the Shadow of the Moon" and its companion pieces about the engineering effort, "Moon Machines".-drl

MovieHoliks I saw this documentary off Netflix the other day, and I hope this is the right one, since there were several options on IMDb for "Rocket Men". Just a coincidence that I watched this only a couple days before seeing the recent premiere of the mini-series, "The Astronaut Wives Club", which I referred to as "The Right Stuff: The Feminist Revisionist Version"- basically that same story from the perspectives of the women in the various different astronauts' wives in the Mercury and Apollo (and Gemini perhaps??) space programs. "Rocket Men" is also a good companion piece to TRS, basically showing a lot of the same events in documentary format of course. The film even goes into the Challenger and Columbia disasters a bit. I especially liked the narration by actor, Michael J. Reynolds. Like Levon Helm's narration in TRS, it provided a very down-to-earth homey feel to a literally out of this world subject. But I definitely enjoyed this- found it quite mesmerizing in fact. Again, I hope this is the right movie I'm reviewing-?? LOL

jlmooman3 Very seldom do I want to buy and own a movie.This is one of them. My girlfriend and I stumbled upon this film when my internet (and thereby Netflix) went down last night. KCET just so happened to be airing this "documentary" about the first 50 years of American manned spaceflight. And I hesitate to call it a documentary because it's not what you'd consider a traditional one. There was no agenda, no call to action, no extended interviews.It was a "film" in the grandest sense, as art. The combination of the cinematography, much of it from NASA's own cameras, some of it previously unseen, the music with original scores made just for this film, and the pacing of these snapshots in time - all culminated in a surreal experience. I literally sat at the edge of my seat, holding my breath. I have never been so enthralled.The only real negative about the film is the distribution. I couldn't find it easily. I had to go all the way to Amazon.de (Germany) to find it and get it shipped internationally. But that's not necessarily a fault of the film, just its limited distribution.This is not the film to learn about the American space program. There are plenty of documentaries and books that cover the details. This is a film to experience with your total attention. Turn down the lights, turn up the sound - because you're in for a ride.