FOR ALL MANKIND (1989) / FORMAT: BD / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: AL REINERT / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind, making the first human footprints on the moon’s surface, fifty years ago this month. You’re unlikely to have missed this anniversary, as it’s been marked by the cinematic releases of two new documentaries, Apollo 11 and Armstrong. The Criterion Collection has also marked the occasion with this new Blu-ray release of Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind.
While the two new films focus on the most famous mission and its commander, For All Mankind compiles footage from several Apollo flights. Reinert discovered, back in 1979, a huge NASA archive of film footage from these missions. Over a course of ten years, he meticulously sifted through it and edited it together, accompanied by audio interviews he carried out with the astronauts.
The finished film takes the structure of one lunar mission – take-off, the journey through space, landing, exploring the surface, and the return. The first impression anyone must get from it, particularly the cutting between different angles of the launch procedure, is amazement at the sheer breadth of footage. We do know that it’s not actually one mission but several edited together, but this artifice doesn’t matter, as what Reinert created was not a factual account but an emotive one, a dramatisation of what it feels like to go to the moon.
Brilliantly edited, the film rattles along at pace and you can’t help but share in the awe of the astronauts as they recall travelling into space and looking back at Earth. Also infectious is the fun they have – playing zero-gravity catch on board the spacecraft and singing silly songs as they skip across the moon, not to mention the short-statured Apollo 12 astronaut who remarked, upon stepping out of the lunar module, “Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”
For All Mankind is a stunning way to experience the Apollo missions for yourself, and now is the perfect time to do so, thanks to both the big anniversary and this great release from Criterion. The high-def digital transfer and 5.1 soundtrack make it more immersive than ever, and there’s an impressive range of extras, though not all of them are new to this set.
The standout is An Accidental Gift, a half-hour ‘Making Of’ documentary from 2009 which goes into how NASA shot the footage and how it has been preserved and restored, as well as Reinert’s journey compiling it – genuinely fascinating content for us film history nerds. There’s also a commentary from Reinert and astronaut Eugene Cernan, a collection of on-camera interviews with Apollo crew, and a video about astronaut Alan Bean’s lunar-inspired paintings, plus a booklet with essays from Reinert and Terrence Rafferty.
