#48, 2019 Skandies

Apparently the raison d’être for this documentary, aside from 2019 being the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, was to present some recently discovered high-quality footage of, e.g., the crowds watching the launch; sadly, the first steps on the moon are the same gray smears that have been kicking around since 1969.  And footage is pretty much all there is to this, apart from a handful of captions displaying countdowns and diagrams showing distances covered.  It’s es­sentially just the eight days of contemporary coverage of the Apollo 11 mission whittled down to a trim ninety minutes, with no commentary from the intervening half century: no narration, no talking heads.  So, not particularly edifying, not particularly dramatic⁠—we know it all went smoothly⁠—just a replay of one of the most important moments in the history of the fuckin’ solar system for those of us who weren’t there.

#38, 2019 Skandies

And just as Apollo 11 was timed to come out the year of the mission’s 50th anniversary, 1917 was released on the, uh, 102nd anniversary of its titular year.  The gimmick here is that it starts with a couple of British soldiers toward the end of World War I being given a mission to deliver a letter to a colonel in a distant trench ordering him to abort a planned assault on the German line, as aerial reconnaissance has revealed that the Germans’ supposed retreat has actually been the setup for a trap.  And then we follow the soldiers, never cutting away (or cutting at all), for two hours of near constant motion through a series of archetypal WWI locales: bustling trenches, abandoned trenches, the no-man’s land between them, abandoned farms with biplanes dog­fighting overhead, ruined cities, forests full of soldiers, battle­field triage areas.  I saw some reviewers compare the film to a theme park ride, with our protagonists proceeding down a track with various dangers popping out at them along the way.  But those rides tend to be pretty hokey, whereas 1917 is all about cutting-edge spectacle: no gray or even colorized smears of the sort we get from genuine WWI footage, but ultra-crisp hi-res vistas that got this movie compared to the latest generation of video games.  From what I’ve seen of those games, that seems like an accurate comparison to me.  So much so that I wouldn’t be shocked if in the years to come I forget that this was actually a movie.

“Gone to the Moon” (Fastbacks, 1993)

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