![]() Other Apollo crewmen may also join the line-up.īut one star will be missing: Armstrong, who is a recluse. Aldrin will attend this week's gala premiere, along with fellow lunar astronauts Mike Collins, Alan Bean and Harrison Schmitt. The first men on the Moon, Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed on 20 July, 1969. ![]() Twelve men (of whom nine are still alive) landed on the Moon while the remainder flew over its surface. A total of 24 astronauts took part in the missions, with three - Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan and John Young - flying twice. It absorbed 5 per cent of the US federal budget at the time and involved nine flights to the Moon, of which six landed on its surface. The Apollo programme was a remarkable technological achievement. He told his father: "I knew what you did, but I never understood what it meant until now".' 'After the film, Adam - now an adult - was in tears. Sington added that at one screening the astronaut Ed Mitchell, who flew on the Apollo 14 mission, arrived with his son Adam. Nevertheless, I have had so many people come up to me at screenings and say: "Thank you for making me feel proud to be an American again".' ![]() 'I just thought it was a wonderful story. The director, Sington, in an interview with The Observer, said he had not set out to exploit American nostalgia. In the Shadow of the Moon also won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Grand Prize of the Boulder Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Florida Film Festival. Although not involved with the movie's making, Howard liked it so much that he agreed to promote the film ahead of its release. The film has won the backing of the Hollywood director Ron Howard, who directed Apollo 13. 'Remember when we used to look up,' says the film's tag line, a reference not just to the days when the world gazed at the Moon but when it also looked up to the United States. Over the past week they have been pouring cash into newspaper and TV adverts for the film. This point has not been lost on the promoters of In the Shadow of the Moon. 'The Moon landings were the greatest of American adventures and of all human achievements.' 'There is a harking back to "golden age" moments,' said Professor Robert Thompson, a popular culture expert at the University of Syracuse, in upstate New York. Hence the patriotic nostalgia that is enveloping the film. Most people have forgotten quite what those heady days meant. In the Sixties and Seventies the world watched with open admiration as American heroes flew across a quarter of a million miles of space to plant the Stars and Stripes on the Moon's surface. These include Paul Haggis's Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron Grace Is Gone, in which John Cusack has to tell his two daughters their mother has been killed in action in Iraq Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon as an American whose Egyptian-born husband is suspected of international terrorism and Brian De Palma's Redacted, about an army squad that torments an Iraqi family.īy contrast, In the Shadow of the Moon harks back to a very different era. ![]() The film's laid-back style contrasts with the plethora of big-budget war movies scheduled for release in the near future, including Tom Cruise's Lions For Lambs, set in Afghanistan, and several films dealing with the Iraq quagmire. Today America is obsessed with terrorism, the war in Iraq and international threats to its citizens' safety. In the US the documentary strikes a chord because it harks back to an age when the country's success and technological expertise were acclaimed by the world. ![]()
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