Product: For All Mankind [VHS] (1989)
Rating: 5.0
Film, not video, for the first time
When I first saw this movie back in 1989 (?), the stunning part was seeing film footage from Apollo for the first time. The film was printed from the originals in the archives, with a machine constructed there for that purpose, as I understand it. This was the first time we saw film, not video, from space, and it was stunning.Now having watched the DVD today, the film-in-space aspect is less startling. But what I found compelling now was the footage of the engineers in Houston watching the first steps on the moon. The astonishing moment in history is written on their faces, which have expressions almost as blank and childlike as the faces of the characters seeing aliens for the first time at the end of Spielberg's Close Encounters. Except that in this film it's real.The Blu-ray holds promise of restored footage. The DVD seems to show some wear and tear on the film that was not so apparent when the movie was in theaters. As I write this, the Blu-ray is ordered but has not yet arrived.