MOVIE REVIEW : ‘For Mankind’--Just Out of This World

“For All Mankind” (at selected theaters) allows us to experience a flight to the moon as has never before been possible. From blastoff to landing on the lunar surface, we share in the eerie fun of weightlessness within a spaceship’s cabin, in glorious views of Earth in all its shimmering, swirling magnificence, and in the equally awesome approach of the moon, a gray, crater-pocked vastness.

In this dazzling, exhilarating context, astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon take on a new awesomeness. Brian Eno’s sonorous, ambient score heightens the adventure’s mystical aspect.

A decade in the making, “For All Mankind” is a remarkable labor of love on the part of Texas Monthly contributing editor Al Reinert, who viewed all 6 million feet of film in the Apollo and Gemini archives and taped 80 hours of reminiscences with the astronauts. From this vast material he and his crew created a taut, swift, 80-minute movie in which we hear the voices of 13 astronauts, representing eight of the nine manned flights to the moon made between December, 1968, and November, 1972. The color film shot on the nine missions was then carefully blown up from 16 to 35 millimeter.

If “For All Mankind” gives us an unprecedented thrill, it also gives us, intentionally or otherwise, an idealized image of the all-American male--trim, rugged, resourceful, serious but good-humored, humble, patriotic and reflective--a description that probably could also apply to the men we see from time to time back on Earth at mission control.

In Reinert’s intricate mosaic of images and voices, we never get to know any of those guys somersaulting in that weightless cabin. You sense that Reinert’s method is in the spirit of fair play, but you wish that somehow an individual with whom you could identify would have emerged to make the film a more personal experience. Some of the remarks heard have a twangy folksiness, but others are quite eloquent.

“For All Mankind” (Times-rated Family), which would be an ideal permanent Disneyland attraction, leaves us wanting to know more about the man who found walking on the moon a spiritual experience and the man who concluded that the significance of the nine flights was that, for the first time, they allowed “man to see himself and Earth in a different perspective.”