![]() ![]() Adding up to fewer historical US space program movies than there are Final Destinations.) (There's also the quite fine 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon that basically owes its existence to Apollo 13, and if we really want to squint, the 2000 Australian comedy The Dish. By my count, I get two, 1983's The Right Stuff and 1995's Apollo 13, and it just so happens that a kindly fate has ensured that both of them are pretty tremendous movies - the first unambiguously great, the second so deliriously close to great that I'm tempted just to sweep it in, particular given how far better it is than anything else its director has ever touched. * It is the high water mark of the last Golden Age of American nostalgia, and given that, it's always surprised me a bit that there are so very few non-documentary movies about the Space Race, and the history of NASA through the end of the Apollo Program. ![]() ![]() The Space Age dominated American consciousness for a decade or more, creating a new mode of popular culture more or less out of whole cloth, and creating mythology out of living, breathing humans for the last time before Watergate and Vietnam killed all the innocence and naïveté that made such hero-worship possible. ![]() I shall today take a look at the latter sort, revisiting a summer movie of yore that meant an awful lot to a certain adolescent who'd later become something of a film blogger. This week: it would appear, from the evidence, that there are two ways you can treat the Apollo moon missions in cinema - with utter contempt, as in Transformers: Dark of the Moon or this week's Apollo 18, or with worshipful respect and adoration and patriotic tubthumping. Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. ![]()
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