space: October 2007 Archives

In the Shadow of the Moon is not bad.

I saw it a couple weeks ago and a couple of points stuck out at me. The first was when one of the guys mentions that an atheist from Dallas sued for the astronauts quoting from Genesis during the first moon pass. (They don’t mention it was activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.) I can sympathize, but it seems awfully inhumanist not to let the astronauts express their personal beliefs. Up there with the most amazing sight seen by eyes until then, they related to the splendor of the universe as they understood it. They were representing all of us up there, but they didn’t do wrong.

Mainly, the ending isn’t quite what I had hoped. They do explicitly point out that no one has set foot on the moon since Apollo 17, but Sington doesn’t leverage that into a value judgment. In the Shadow of the Moon is a retrospective, encasing these old men in amber. I had hoped it could also be a call to action for further moon missions, or at least explore the absence of swagger of these guys’ caliber nowadays. There’s little heroism in today’s socialized space program, but In the Shadow of the Moon shows it only in negative.

You might check it out when it’s on DVD.