Review: APOLLO 11

We begin as the launch of the Apollo 11 mission is only hours away. Military helicopters lift and glide over the greater area as masses of late 60s Americans tinker with their cars, look through binoculars or smile for the documenting cameras, sitting car roofs like advertising models. The gigantic transport vehicle for the Saturn rocket rolls on tracks into place. Deep within the centre of operations, the three men who will be doing this are installed in their complicated protective suits while a montage of their lives leading to this moment plays without commentary. And we marvel at the depth and clarity of the images before remembering that this was one of the greatest moments in the planet's history and the people at its heart knew how to record it. The biggest budgeted blockbusters don't have this coverage.

This is why this documentary can orchestrate moments significance into peaks and that is why it is a thrilling film. That we know this story already is no preparation for the confronting power of the lift off or the edge of seat powered descent to the moon's surface or the eerie approach the Eagle lander to the Command module as it grows from a speck to an articulated vehicle escaping the moon's pull. A single shot through the command module's port hole of the inferno of re-entry really does strike awe.

The sound design with its restless radio communication, media voices and murmuring staff at Houston adds a kind of shifting weight to the visuals. It's not just our information stream but a near-musical support for the seriousness of the moments we are witnessing. We are meant to take it for granted in this narration-free documentary but the sheer work of it must have been massive. The electronic score by Matt Morton is a prefect accompaniment to images from the time of Switched on Bach and relieves us from the overstatement of an orchestral bloat. Like the complex audio mix, it needs to respond before we know it. At times it buzzed out the cinema speakers. I'm a sucker for electronic music at the movies and couldn't have been happier.

I'm old enough to have seen the moon landing on tv. We watched it at school. It's hard to articulate what I felt about it while not yet ten years old but I do remember understanding how important it was and how that's what history looked like when a video camera picked it up. There was no question of doing any schooling for the rest of the day so we were sent home. I marvelled again at the vague blobby images on the monochrome box in the rumpus room. Mum was excited and Nanna impressed but stoic (probably infuriated that the Russians hadn't got there first). The amount of footage shown on the ABC was small enough to form a loop that seemed to be the only thing happening in the world. I still had a mind young enough to absorb information swiftly and one which saturated from repeats of the same signal. I went to the table and drew, crayon on paper, with my back to the tv.

I was still there and still in the moment, I'd just run out of space for the moment. But as dismissive as that seems it means that I recall clearly the general thrill in the world at the sight of it and the press of great big history thickening the air. A film like this (and please try to see it at a cinema) fills in so much left to my imagination. The best part of that is that the truth of it is actually better.