Day 54: For All Mankind (1989)
It is by pure coincidence that, as I write this entry for the “Criterion Summer,” NASA’s final shuttle mission is occurring in space. Launching yesterday into the “final frontier,” the journey of shuttle “Atlantis” marks the end of an era for the renowned space program and the beginning of an uncertain future as taxpayers, if you can believe it, seem to have lost the desire for space exploration. If only every America were to watch Al Reinert’s “For All Mankind,” the amazing documentary of man’s greatest exploratory achievement. For then they may remember what a colossal feet we have accomplished and why it is pivotal we continue to explore.
In “For All Mankind,” Reinert provides his audience with 80 full minutes of real and mostly rare NASA footage taken from the Apollo space missions of the 1960′s and 70′s with narration provided solely by the astronauts who experienced the journey, including Jim Lovell, Michael Collins, Charles Conrad, Jack Swigert, and Ken Mattingly. After sifting through six million feet of film footage and 80 hours of NASA interviews, Reinert delivers a single story of space travel and moon landing through a collage of all the trips we have made, focusing on the similarities felt by the astronauts while on their specific trips.
Through this collage of footage we witness, from both cameras mounted on the ships and “home video” shot by the astronauts, the full trip, starting with the jitters of launch, continuing with the shear amazement of being in space, and ending with the exhilaration of walking on the moon’s surface.
From start to finish, the film dives into the minds of the men who made history and, because of this, it is very tonal in its nature and less concerned with either explaining events in detail or differentiating between the separate missions taking place. In fact, even the names of the astronauts seem unimportant to Reinert as he allows for them to be said in narration and on the footage but never tries to distinguish astronaut from astronaut for the sake of audience clarity. It is as if these unidentifiable spacemen, with their face shields reflecting the earth, represent something more than just a single being. They are like an amalgam of all mankind and, as they bounce around the grey craters of the moon, we are allowed to put ourselves in their place and experience the beauty all on our own.
As the future of NASA and our space exploration now hang in the balance, there is no better time to see “For All Mankind” and remember why we looked up to the stars in the first place and why we should continue to do so for the rest of time.
To learn more about “For All Mankind,” check out Criterion’s page here.
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