One of filmmaking's cheapest tricks is on-screen applause — where actors clap to cue viewers that they should also be impressed. There's a lot of that in Apollo 11, but it's not cheap.
In this documentary about the people who pulled off the spectacular feat of sending Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969, the ovations are genuine, spontaneous and well deserved.
Nasa's first lunar landing is not exactly obscure. And Apollo 11 doesn't profess to offer new information or insights. But it does offer a wealth of fresh images and sound, assembled into an immersive Imax journey by director and editor Todd Douglas Miller. It's a more visceral trip than any moviegoer — even the armchair experts — has ever taken before.
It was inevitable some movie about the first moon landing would be released in 2019, the 50th anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin's stroll on the lunar surface. But Miller's doco still packs surprises, because in the buildup to that anniversary, a momentous discovery was made at the National Archives: A hoard of never-developed film from the Apollo 11 mission was unearthed, some of it in 70mm.