Apollo 11 (2019) on Netflix

G20191h 33mDocumentary History

In 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins fly Apollo 11 toward the Moon, aiming to land humans there for the first time. The story is told through archival footage.

Netflix3.9/5
IMDb8.1/1029,091 votes
Rotten Tomatoes99%

Trailer

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Plot summary

Made for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Moon landing, the documentary is assembled from archival footage and still photographs, with no narration, interviews or modern recreations. Newly discovered 70 mm film, previously unreleased, shows the final preparations at Launch Complex 39, the spectators who gathered for the launch and the Saturn V rocket lifting off. Mission operations engineers of the Apollo program appear alongside the crew, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, who are also seen in wordless sequences of family photographs tracing their lives up to 1969. Animated line drawings illustrate parts of the Apollo spacecraft. The record begins with the eleventh hour preparations for the launch.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Apollo 11 (2019)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

In May 2017, a search by director Todd Douglas Miller's team together with NASA and the National Archives and Records Administration turned up unreleased 70 mm footage of Apollo 11's preparation, launch, mission control, recovery and post-flight activities, including spectators at the launch and work aboard the USS Hornet.
The production team sourced over 11,000 hours of audio recordings, among them 30-track tapes of voice recordings from every Mission Control station; software engineer Ben Feist wrote software to improve the newly available audio's fidelity, and Stephen Slater synchronized the audio with silent 16 mm Mission Control footage.
While returning from the Moon on day 8 of the mission, Michael Collins's biomedical sensor came loose and he wisecracked, "I promise to let you know if I stop breathing," but the film shows the incident during the approach to the Moon, before the Columbia and the Eagle separated.
Composer Matt Morton restricted himself to electronic instruments that were available in 1969 when writing the film's score.
The production team spotted folk musician John Stewart's song "Mother Country" in the Lunar Module voice recordings, and the song ended up in the film.