For All Mankind (1989) on Netflix

NR19891h 20mDocumentary History

NASA's Apollo crews flew to the Moon between 1968 and 1972, and footage they shot along the way was archived. Their own voices, recorded in interviews, tell of the journey.

Netflix3.7/5
IMDb8.1/107,374 votes
Rotten Tomatoes94%

Plot summary

Footage shot by astronauts during NASA's Apollo missions makes up the whole of this documentary. Material from Apollo 7 through Apollo 17, archived after the crews returned, is cut together so that it reads as one voyage to the Moon. The only voices are those of the astronauts and the flight controllers at mission control, taken from interviews and from recordings made during the flights. The men describe the launch, the weightlessness in which objects drift free, and what the footage shows: the Earth as a full circle in the dark, sunrise at its edge, the far side of the Moon. Some shots come from the Gemini program.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about For All Mankind (1989)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

The idea began in 1979 after Reinert researched a story about the Apollo program for Texas Monthly and learned that huge amounts of high-quality footage shot by the astronauts had been archived by NASA without ever being seen by the public; it took ten years to finish the film.
To copy the original film held at the Johnson Space Center, Reinert had to take an optical printer and scan each frame of the 16mm original and enlarge it to 35mm, a job that took him 18 months for the 80 minutes used in the documentary.
Directed by Al Reinert with music by Brian Eno, the documentary draws its footage from Apollo 7 through Apollo 17 and assembles it to look like a single trip to the Moon, using only audio from the interviews Reinert conducted with Apollo crew members.
Most of the footage is of the astronauts and mission control during Apollo, but Reinert also used shots from Project Gemini, such as Ed White's spacewalk from Gemini 4 with its infamous lost glove, and a Gemini re-entry standing in for Trans Lunar Injection.
The title comes from the lunar plaque left by the Apollo 11 astronauts, and the excerpt used in the film from President John F. Kennedy's Address to Rice University of 12 September 1962 is slightly altered to conform to it.
The home video releases carry a commentary track by director Al Reinert and Eugene A. Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to stand on the surface of the Moon.