Moonshot Blu-ray

Moonshot

 (2009)

Moonshot Blu-ray offers solid video and audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
From their incredible lunar landing to their safe return back to Earth, shadow the intrepid astronauts of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong (Daniel Lapaine), Buzz Aldrin (James Marsters) and Michael Collins (Andrew Lincoln), as they explore outer space and take "one giant leap for mankind." Blending convincing reenactments with original NASA footage, this docudrama offers viewers an insider's perspective of one of modern history's most important events.

For more about Moonshot and the Moonshot Blu-ray release, see the Moonshot Blu-ray Review

Moonshot Blu-ray Review

You can't take one small step in the same river twice, and there are too many other, better offerings about NASA's race to the moon.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 11, 2009

The fortieth anniversary of the United States' audacious, and really improbably successful, first journey to the lunar surface has been greeted with a slew of really excellent celebratory Blu-ray releases. There has been the wonderful NASA compilation When We Left the Earth, featuring breathtaking scenes culled from the space agency's own archives. And For All Mankind offered some of that same footage with an impressive overview of the entire space program. When you couple these relatively recent releases with older feature films like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, you might be prone to ask, why bother with Moonshot? And, frankly, you'd be right. While this sort of docudrama cum movie of the week made for the History Channel plays like a sort of Clif Notes version of longer, better documentaries and feature films, there's too much left unsaid and unportrayed to make this anything more than a grab bag of anecdotes and incidences. There's very little dramatic through line and really no chance to connect with any of the characters, most of whom are treated almost deliberately as stereotypes.

Man's breathtaking first steps into outer space are certainly the stuff with the potential for great entertainment. Anyone who's experienced any of the four works mentioned above will attest that whether in factual, documentary form, or a more dramatized environment, there's simply so much human drama combined with an almost mind boggling array of technology (which seems to our modern eyes almost impossibly baroque) that the mere fact that these people actually landed on our satellite seems an afterthought. What we're provided instead in Moonshot are brief glyphs of each of the main players, including of course Neil Armstrong (Daniel Lapaine), Buzz Aldrin (James Marsters) and Michael Collins (Andrew Lincoln). Armstrong is the cool cucumber, emotionally repressed and distant. Aldrin is the loose cannon, quick tempered and volatile. And Collins is pretty much wallpaper here, given a bit of character arc because he's recovering from a serious back injury which almost prevented him from being part of the historic mission.

The real Buzz Aldrin provides a brief introduction to 'Moonshot.'

What hinders Moonshot from developing any momentum is the slipshod, segmented format the telefilm employs. We get literally seconds devoted to epochal moments, such as the devastating fire which claimed the lives of three astronauts. Sometimes this anecdotal style can be at least passingly amusing, as when the astronauts try out their urine collection devices in the privacy of their own homes. Too often, though, Moonshot feels like it's rushing through literal earth shattering history without ever giving us the emotional goods. The film does do a passably effective job of communication the camaraderie of the astronauts and their wives, but there's nothing even remotely close to the emotionally devastating moment in, for example, Apollo 13 when Kathleen Quinlan drops her wedding ring down the bathtub drain, a bad omen to be sure.

The somewhat ironic thing about Moonshot is that despite its halting attempts to inject drama by giving us a sort of "backstage pass" to what was ostensibly really going on, the film only comes alive with the grainy archival footage it incorporates, some of which was also part and parcel of both When We Left the Earth and For All Mankind. While the film's minimally effective CGI moments give some new perspectives on what being in a cramped space capsule or actually looking at the moon through a space helmet may have been like, these supposedly more realistic sequences pale in comparison to the drab and dreary really real film Moonshot employs to add a least dribs and drabs of historical veracity.

While none of these actors is probably going to win any major awards for their performances, the lead trio certainly does competent work, with Marsters' Aldrin probably the standout on the male side, if only because the Aldrin character in and of itself has more range than the other two. (The real Aldrin famously suffered from emotional problems for years after his return from the moon). Anna Maxwell Martin as Neil's wife Janet shines on the distaff side, and quickly is able to establish both the fear and resolve that characterized the emotional lives of these women. In fact Moonshot is probably strongest on the human side of things in its portrayal of the wives, as briefly as it tends to do so.

Production design is rather spare and at times fairly ineffective throughout this piece. Don't ask me why (budget I would assume), but Moonshot was filmed in Lithuania, certainly an odd choice for recreating 1960's Houston. While costumes and some of the vintage cars are certainly right on the money, the "feel" of the sets, especially the really minimally dressed capsule interiors, seems odd and actually incorrect.

The History Channel is obviously trying to break out of its "Nostradamus exposé of the week" format by doing these dramatized efforts. Unfortunately they still labor under the pretense that they're basically providing a tarted up factual proceeding. While that may be literally true, it ignores the demands that an actual dramatic piece requires. Moonshot misses its target by a lightyear, unfortunately. Stick to the real thing and you'll have a better opportunity of experiencing the right stuff.

Moonshot Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

Moonshot arrives on Blu-ray with an OK 1080i/AVC encoded transfer that does reasonably well in the sequences filmed in high def, but shows the seams in the many archival pieces utilized. While this was obviously not a big budget feature, the "contemporary" filmed segments sport good to excellent detail and reasonable, if not gorgeously saturated, color. Unfortunately, the archival footage, while easily the most compelling from an emotional standpoint, is in really ragged shape a lot of the time. Unlike some the restored footage found in When We Left the Earth, this often seems to be second or third generation material, seemingly sourced from 16mm at times. It's overly grainy and quite shoddy looking. It's doubly ironic then that on a human impact level, it's the most effective part of this telefilm. I've long lamented History's inexplicably shoddy SD-DVD transfers, and so far their Blu's, while nominally better, aren't even approaching reference quality. Time will tell.

Moonshot Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

More inexplicable decisions confront the audiophile with the two sound mixes available here, a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and an uncompressed PCM 2.0. Things may not be quite as bad as they seem. While the DD mix is strangely compressed, with a really noticeable lack of both extreme lows and highs, it ultimately doesn't matter in terms of surround utilization since there's very little discrete channel placement to begin with. The 5.1 does seem really anemic, however, during the liftoff sequences, when you would expect your subwoofer to be jumping around on your home theater room's floor. No such luck. The PCM 2.0 actually is the better choice here, with at least a semblance of thundering LFE and an overall clarity and precision that the DD 5.1 mix lacks. The kind of lackadaisacal sound design Moonshot offers, though, is another head scratcher. A film portraying historical feats such as these, especially ones this technologically minded, certainly could have provided a lot of opportunities for some more thoughtful soundfield placements.

Moonshot Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

Three pretty lackluster bonuses supplement the main feature. There are galleries of several space missions and astronaut biographies, as well as a jukebox offering five tunes featured on the film's soundtrack as source cues.

Moonshot Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

There are simply too many better choices out there when it comes to reliving man's first landing on another body in space. Moonshot unfortunately has the wrong stuff.

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