From The Earth To The Moon
Inspired by his experiences making Apollo 13, actor Tom Hanks took on the duties of writing, producing and even directing the epic 12-part HBO miniseries From The Earth To The Moon. The result? In most cases, every bit the sheer poetry that Apollo 13 was, only spread out over enough episodes for a half-day viewing marathon.
Adapted chiefly from Andrew Chiakin’s incredible book ” Man On The Moon: The Voyages Of The Apollo Astronauts” From The Earth To The Moon chronicles the Apollo lunar exploration program from beginning to end. What always impressed me about this show is that it does not end with Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong’s first footstep on the moon is, in fact, the midpointof the series, not the end of it. And the beginnings go all the way back to President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to the American people in 1961: to put a man on the moon, and return him safely, by the end of the decade. The Mercury and Gemini programs are barely covered in the first episode, though that first hour does win big points with me for its dramatic portrayal of the almost-tragic Gemini 8 mission, in which a malfunctioning thruster nearly killed astronauts David Scott and Neil Armstrong by threatening to send their capsule into an uncontrollable spin. How much of a spin? You’ll have to see for yourself - it’s quite a special effects spectacle. The poetic montage of the first episode ends with the final Gemini mission and preparations for the first Apollo launch.
That first launch never happened, as a dress rehearsal on the launch pad ended in a fire that killed Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White. These events occur in the opening moments of the second episode, the rest of which deals very solemnly with the investigation into the fire and the resulting fatalities. Kevin Pollack, renowned for his stand-up comedy, plays a surprisingly straight role here and does an amazing job as an executive from one of the companies contracted to handle the building of the Apollo spacecraft. Leaving the cast in this episode, however, are two of the series’ most notable performers, Mark Rolston (who has appeared on Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5) and the surprisingly natural Chris Isaak as the premiere U.S. spacewalker, Ed White. As accustomed as I am to seeing Rolston play unsavory characters, his gruff-but-fair turn as Gus Grissom quickly gets across many of the personality traits that the late astronaut’s colleagues have described over the years. And while I’m praising actors, I also need to single out Nick Searcy (later of Seven Days, seen here as flight-grounded Chief Astronaut Deke Slayton) and Dan Lauria (who, with his role as NASA boss Jim Webb, finally got me to stop thinking to myself, “Hey, it’s the dad from The Wonder Years!”).
Apollo 7, the first successful manned flight, was a testy affair in and of itself, so the episode which covers it wisely looks at it from a pre-launch perspective. A skeptical (and fictional) documentary director (thirtysomething’s Peter Horton) gets full access to the crew prior to the Apollo 7 launch, finding mission commander Wally Schirra (Mark Harmon in an exceptional performance) to have little of the “go fever” that one would’ve expected from NASA astronauts in the 60s. And with good reason: a fellow Mercury veteran, Schirra is commanding the maiden Apollo flight that would have been flown by his friend Gus Grissom. Again, an all-star cast comes out to play, including Ann Magnuson in a surprisingly small role as a NASA nurse. And even though we know that Apollo 7 will take to the sky safely at the end of the hour, the tension surrounding the mission preparations - and Schirra’s no-nonsense attitude which brooked no leniency when it came to problems with the Apollo spacecraft - are palpable. Even though we go that extra step of making a believer out of Horton’s character by the time the credits roll, it’s still moving and memorable. Be on the lookout for the “escape wires” action sequence, which was shot on the real deal with NASA’s cooperation; it’s a pre-launch emergency bail-out system still in use at Cape Canaveral’s launch pads.
I’ve always been torn with the fourth episode, 1968. I understand what the director and editors were attempting to convey, with the dizzying array of images from that year’s news - the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, anti-war protests gone horribly wrong, and so on. 1968 was not a banner year for the world’s supposedly civilized nations, and yes, the news footage that unfolds, Woodstock-style, in multiple windows conveys that. However, the device is used perhaps too much, too early on. There’s a great story to tell with the unprecedented Apollo 8 flight, and we do finally get around to hearing that story. But in some ways, the episode’s quiet climax - a real scene which unfolded when a telegram was sent to NASA from a man who simply said “you saved 1968″ - is almost a bit of a letdown. If any single flight deserved a two-parter, maybe Apollo 8 should’ve been it. Most people would’ve expected Apollo 11 to get that treatment if any one mission did, but a lot really was on the line with Apollo 8.
Surprisingly, much of the next episode happens on the ground, and its events either predate or run concurrently with the events depicted in previous episodes. Spider tells the story of the development, design, construction and troubleshooting of the Lunar Excursion Module, as seen through the eyes of the engineers tasked with building the unwieldly machine and their manager, who grows far more personally attached to both the project and the first LEM than he expects. It’s surprisingly touching and genuinely interesting, and indicative of the marvelous flexibility that was part of the format of the series. Episodes like Spider make me wish that Tom Hanks could talk HBO into bankrolling a follow-up series chronicling the post-Apollo years of the American manned space program. We do actually get to see the Apollo 9 mission, in which the first LEM is tested in Earth orbit, but the central character of the story is the LEM itself.
The halfway point of From The Earth To The Moon brings us to the surface of the moon itself. Mare Tranquilitatis (directed by Spielberg alumnus Frank Marshall) does a good job of playing out the drama of Apollo 11 - including the very real crew conflicts between Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin - while showing that, from every viewpoint, from every pair of eyes watching the moon landing, there was a common denominator: wonder. The next episode follows the Apollo 12 crew, playing up the crew’s happy-go-lucky cameraderie, with that mission’s lunar landing possibly being the single funniest moment in the whole series.
With We Interrupt This Broadcast, the series faces a unique challenge: the Apollo 13 story had already been told so definitively in the movie of the same name, how can you tell it from a different vantage point? The episode solves the problem by pushing the mission itself almost into the background, addressing instead the handoff of the old guard of Cronkite-style journalism to the new age of tabloid TV news. Though you’d expect this series to stay focused on the missions in question, this conflict is surprisingly effective for the episode in question. For Miles And Miles chronicles Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard’s fight to get his flight status restored after years of suffering from an inner ear disease that robbed the first American astronaut of his sense of balance. Galileo Was Right (directed by David Carson, of Star Trek fame) is an interesting look at the geological training efforts for Apollo 15.
It’s in the show’s final two hours that things start to slip a little bit. The segment which plays out against the events of Apollo 16 also chronicles the struggles of the astronauts’ wives over the years, ranging from arriving in Houston to find that no homes had been built for the astronauts yet, to Susan Borman’s fight with alcoholism. This episode, directed by Sally Field, dances precariously between being extremely compelling and somewhat tedious. The final episode, written by Tom Hanks himself, is probably the biggest misstep in the series, comparing and contrasting the Apollo 17 mission with Georges Melies’ 1902 film about a voyage to the moon. From The Earth To The Moon tries to emphasize that, despite a jaded public and media no longer providing wall-to-wall coverage of the post-Apollo 14 moonshots, it was never routine, these later episodes which focus almost minimally on the missions themselves almost seem to prove an opposite point: there the missions were, in fact, so routine that there wasn’t enough story there to fill an hour of television.
A fourth disc in the set provides 3-D models of the lunar vehicles, the complete promo package for the series (some of which I highly recommend, as they’re almost as poetic as the show itself in places), and the complete Kennedy speech urging America to reach for the moon. Most of the content on the fourth disc is in DVD-ROM format only, however, so I wasn’t able to review the PC-only content.
A solid package of an excellent series. From The Earth To The Moon gives us a slightly romanticized but still realistic look at the emotional impact behind the Apollo program, and it’s just the right length - for all my talk of wishing that we’d gotten dramatizations of Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and maybe the lead-up to the shuttle era, if this show ran out of steam only in the last episode, that’s a good sign that they knew where the cutoff point was. Very highly recommended: one of the best things ever to hit a television screen.