Between Roving Mars, the just-in-theaters In the Shadow of the Moon (which I’ve
heard great things about, but haven’t yet seen) and several other titles, there
seems to currently be a whole spate of documentaries about outer space
exploration. Directed by Tony Palmer and featuring music written, arranged and
performed by Mike Oldfield, The Space
Movie was made in 1979 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the moon
landing. Since this represents the first release by NASA and the United States
National Archive of massive amounts of lunar landscape footage, as well as unseen
film of life on the spacecraft, Mars, Venus and beyond, there’s plenty of
top-notch material here, even if it by now seems dated — stuff that you might
have glimpsed in science class some decades back.
takes full advantage of specially granted access to the NASA video vault to
craft a wonderful montage of the first decade of life in space, running around
80 minutes in total. Included are conversations between the astronauts and
ground control in
of chatter, alternately authoritative and giddy with excitement, that really
brings the monumental nature of the achievement of space exploration into stark
relief. Oldfield, meanwhile, uses extracts from his ground-breaking symphonic
tone-poems such as “Tubular Bells” and “Hergest Ridge,” interweaving these in
and out of the NASA soundtracks together with new music; the result is a unique
and kind of ethereal soundtrack, nicely matching an equally unique filmic
document.
surround sound audio track, The Space
Movie comes with a slight but fairly rewarding slate of bonus materials:
six previously unseen minutes of footage, and a 26-minute interview with the
chatty Palmer on the making of the movie. Overall this feels like a bit of a
quid pro quo to whet the appetite for All
My Loving, Palmer’s well known, Beatles-enabled British music doc, which is
also releasing through distributor MVD in a few weeks. Still, as far as trade-off
inducements go, this certainly isn’t a bad one. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)