'In the Shadow of the Moon' at Cinema Arts

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

September 14, 2007

Disbelief still clings like layers of lunar dust to the notion of mankind venturing to the moon. Fans of conspiracy theories, for instance, persist in thinking that all those Apollo space missions of 35-plus years ago were carried out on TV sound stages. It's a notion debunked good-naturedly by Charles Duke, one of the Apollo astronauts interviewed in the just-released documentary, "In the Shadow of the Moon." "If it was staged," Duke asks rhetorically, "why did they stop after just six times?"

If these conspiracy-minded folks are looking for something even harder to believe, they should consider this: After all these decades and many, many miles of fiction and nonfiction film devoted to the subject (including 1995's Tom Hanks hit, "Apollo 13" and the 1998 Hanks-produced HBO miniseries, "From the Earth to the Moon") a relatively modest documentary such as "In the Shadow of the Moon" can still - remarkably - arouse so much attention from critics and audiences.

The film opens this weekend at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington a week after being greeted enthusiastically by reviewers upon its initial release in New York and other select cities. It features interviews with the surviving members of all of the Apollo moon missions, along with an array of archival footage. New York magazine's notoriously grumpy film critic David Edelstein says he came out of a screening of the film "feeling lighter, by about five-sixths, than when I went in" while the New York Observer's eminent Andrew Sarris wrote that British filmmaker David Sington's documentary "moved me to the extremes of nostalgia, regret and downright admiration as no other movie has moved me this year."

Real-life space adventure

Such reactions echo the buzz kicked up for the film at January's Sundance Film Festival, where it was a topic of discussion in coffeehouses and street corners all over Park City, Utah. ThinkFilm, the independent distribution company, picked up "Shadow" almost immediately after its Sundance screening. And almost six months later, Ron Howard, who directed "Apollo 13" and helped Hanks produce "From the Earth to the Moon," lent his name and promotional support to Sington's film.

"For some, it's a nostalgia trip," the 48-year-old Sington says of his film in an interview in Manhattan last week. "They love it because it takes them back to their childhoods. And then there's a whole new generation who've been raised solely on fictional space adventure like 'Star Wars' who see real spacecraft for the first time orbiting the moon and they're just blown away."

The Apollo astronauts, still famously unflappable, are perhaps the ones least taken aback by the somewhat galvanic reaction to "In the Shadow of the Moon." They have, after all, been on the receiving end of the world's wide-eyed adulation for decades; few more so than Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, who was at Sundance in January to help absorb the film's first wave of acclaim (it won Best Documentary there) and joined Sington in Manhattan last week.

Lunar legacy

If you ask Aldrin, Apollo 11's lunar module pilot on that historic first lunar landing in July 1969, to account for the movie's reception, you will get several free-floating answers, some having to do with the "Apollo 13" movie's success ("a rendition of great accuracy ... and even though the public knew how it turned out, they were with it all the way") to the way schools have been teaching children about the space program's history and science. "They're doing a much better job at places like that Buzz Aldrin school in Virginia," he says with a grin, showing how much more at ease he is with public appearances than he was 38 years earlier when he was, as Norman Mailer once described him, "all meat and stone."

Aldrin, at 77, looks fit enough to go up again, though he insists he doesn't want to. "I've done my thing. And besides, why fantasize about something that would be impractical for everyone concerned? I'm much more valuable down here consulting and advising people about voyages to Mars and vehicles we need to use after the space shuttle has served its purpose."

Among the other astronauts who are helping promote "Shadow," Edgar G. Mitchell, who piloted Apollo 14's lunar module in 1971 alongside the late Alan Shepard, may be the most soft-spoken and retiring. Mitchell, along with Apollo 13's Fred Haise, frequently visited the Bethpage headquarters of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. as "designated mother hens" to engineers designing, building and testing the lunar landing craft.

These days, Mitchell runs the Florida-based Institute of Noetic Sciences, where he pursues the para-psychological studies he carried out en route to the moon. Asked why the film has struck a chord with contemporary audiences, he speculates that the more profound impressions of the moon program may have simultaneously occurred right now with both his fellow voyagers and with audiences too young to remember the epochal flights.

"There are now, I guess, six billion people on Earth and half of them weren't even born when we went to the moon," Mitchell says. "There's a whole new sense of discovery that can be made by younger people who look at this and say, 'Hey, we took that step and we can go further.'"