[gary]

Apollo 11 is currently showing for the next few days at limited sessions
at Event Cinemas around Australia.

The newly discovered 65mm footage of launch day is fabulous.

For those of us not present in Florida on the day for the launch, it is now
as close as we will ever feel to being present.

The minutiae of the world becomes more evident on the big screen.

For example, I was struck by the heat and humidity the outdoor
spectators appeared to endure, made evident by the glare of the sun
on their faces, the sweat on their foreheads and by their willingness to
wear silly looking giveaway fold-out cardboard caps.

In the VIP section we see several shots of Johnny Carson and as he enters
the stand he appears to be walking alongside Issac Asimov.

As the film progresses through each of the daisy chain of events that
had to go right for the mission to succeed and for the crew to survive,
it is enhanced by the mixing of both the communications between the
crew and CAPCOM and that between controllers extracted from recently
released 30-track "back loops".

Houston had two 30-track tape recorders which recorded all conversations
between all of the controllers.

We hear one of them asking another controller whether he heard about
the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick incident, the news of which was being
somewhat eclipsed by the moon landing.

The small annotation of fuel remaining and altitude in the corner of
the screen as the 16mm camera mounted at Eagle's window shows
the descent to the lunar surface, leaves the heart racing.

The Flight Surgeon reports Armstrong's had reached 150 beats-per-minute.

I liked Matt Morton's music soundtrack.