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‘For All Mankind’
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 17, 1990
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There's a fuzzy blast of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" from a hand-held tape recorder as the Apollo crew eases into orbit round the neighborly neon moon. "This is '2001'-type stuff," one astronaut waxes ecstatic in the Oscar-nominated documentary "For All Mankind." It's a sound bite that perfectly serves this vicarious space odyssey, a composite mission drawn from NASA's nine lunar flights.It's the best of Apollo culled from 80 hours of interviews and 6 million feet of archival film. Mercifully there are no talking heads, no dry statistics, no toxic narration, only the cosmic gist told through the fluent reflections of the two dozen voyagers who came face to face with the man in the moon. Al Reinert, a Texas Monthly contributor, wrote and directed this thoughtfully beautiful look at America's Apollo missionaries, challenged by John F. Kennedy, the moonstruck president, to go where none had gone before. Shot between December 1968 and November 1972, when the space program was flush, the film manages to capture the buoyant spirits and pride that were in the air -- just about enough to lift the rocket from its pad. The astronauts, tucked like caterpillars into their spacesuits, have the right stuff, trust, a willingness to submit their wills and lives to Mission Control. The rocket glares red, spits fire and bits of dry ice, and howls off into the heavens. "It's a moment of supreme elation to feel all that power precisely directed," says one pilot. "I'm leaving the Earth, dusting to the moon." Once outbound, the astronauts continue to marvel at the "blue marble" they've left behind. "You don't think of it as Houston or Texas or the United States. But you think of it as Earth," says another sage. "It's home, people, family, life ... moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception," exclaims still another. In Reinert's love song to Apollo, the heroes are calm under pressure, euphoric under the moonglow and sandbox-playful romping in their lunar rovers. There's no criticism of the men, NASA, America -- no negatives, no wrongs, no failures, no Spam in a can, no wrong stuff. "For All Mankind" is a beatitude of praise, a homesick look at a healthy nation. That's why this history of "all systems go" and "roger that" is Oscar-nominated instead of "Roger and Me." The closest it comes to controversy is when it tackles the question of how astronauts go potty in space.
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