What about the soundtrack?
Ron Howard took some liberties with Apollo 13 but still everyone should watch it once a year. If you don’t find it inspirational check to make sure you have a pulse. Oh, and great soundtrack. Another docudrama that is not 100% historically accurate but everyone should watch is Thirteen Days. I would say anyone who thinks the Cold War was the best of times must not have lived through it, but how to explain Vladimir Putin? From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Chuck McCown Sent: Friday, October 12, 2018 8:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [AFMUG] OT Movie Review First Man. Some spoilers here but I think everyone probably knows how the story ends. First impression was I did not like the style of photography. Too many shaky closeups. One sure fire way to make me choke up, my nose burn and cause my eyes to leak is to expose me to formaldehyde. For some reason and am super super duper hyper sensitive. Other wise I am pretty stoic. The other sure fire way to cause this reaction is if I am exposed to material covering Apollo 1, Challenger or Columbia. Odd emotional reaction every time. I guess because I was so into all of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions when they were happening. I built models. Listened to the moon landing on the radio. Totally geeked out to all of this stuff back in the day. They did not do a very good job in communicating the horrible end to the lives of the Apollo 1 astronauts. Perhaps they did not want to traumatize the audience, but they made it seem like – boom – its all over. The reality was much much more gruesome. They overdramatized the uncommanded roll spin up of Gemini 8. It was a big time emergency but the graphics had it spinning like a dryer on spin cycle. I think max RPM was about 1 rev per second before Neil Armstrong finally isolated it to a reaction control rocket firing continually. He killed the circuit breakers and was able to manually halt the roll. I have spun airplanes at this rate. It is not going to cause you to pass out. If he was not able to stop the increase in roll rate it would have done so, but they guy knew the spacecraft and he knew there were only so many things that could cause this. He did some basic troubleshooting and saved the day. But the biggest thing that I disliked was them showing the inside of the space craft. Panels, annunciators and switches that were dirty, worn and smudged. Like some old bulldozer at a gravel pit instrument panel. Almost as if they built the props from stuff they got out of an aircraft bone yard. In reality, those things were brand spanking new and sparkling clean. The photos exist... Not sure why they chose the grunge. Even the headliner of the spacecraft and their ear muff thingies looked grungy and used. They also showed a Chicago connector on one of the hoses connected to the capsule. Pretty sure a generic jackhammer air connector was not used. They glossed over the 1202 alarm a bit too much. (The book Digital Apollo is a great read about this). They were more concerned about that than the movie lets on. They showed a scene where Neil flew over a super deep crater while running out of fuel. That never happened, he was just picking out a spot between the boulders. So, if you care about fine detail accuracy, you may not enjoy this too much. It is not nearly as good as a PBS special by any stretch of the imagination.
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