For All Mankind

This film is part of the Master of Cinema collection and it's been waiting in my backlog pile for a while. It's a documentary about NASA's trips to the moon put together from all the footage filmed by the astronauts along with with interviews conducted later for the film. Some of the footage is simply amazing. When you think of the moon landings your mind goes to the fuzzy black and white TV transmissions of Neil Armstrong bouncing down a ladder. That's to be expected from a sixties TV signal from the moon. However the footage taken by the 16mm cameras each astronaut had with them is the same quality as anything recorded on the Earth. Now cleaned, restored and blown up to HD it's simply breathtaking and the achievements it represents are even more awesome. It makes me sad that the current plan for getting to Mars isn't expected to happen until the mid-2030s! Obviously they'd already been thinking about it but it only took 7 years to get to the moon after Kennedy's speech. Things seem to be moving far too slowly now. Although the new corporate plans for asteroid mining sound interesting. It's safe to say that the profit motive is going to be a bigger drive than simple exploration tangled in government bureaucracy. I can't believe I'd never seen this film before and that I'd never even heard of it before discovering Masters of Cinema, it's been around since 1989! Glad I have now though, fantastic.