It was only after a second viewing of British doc-maker Mark Craig's gorgeously filmed memory piece The Last Man on the Moon that it struck me just how sad it is for us 21st-century Americans to be casting a nostalgic eye back on the salad days of the U.S. space program. The film opens in the heart of the great Texan metropolis that proudly advertised itself as "Space City." We find ourselves at the Houston Rodeo as lithe young men compete to go 10 seconds or so atop a bucking bronco �" riding a bull so massive and ornery that being shot into space atop a massive Saturn rocket could seem like child's play.
The Last Man on the Moon depicts the destruction of the dreams of a still young-at-heart nation whose handsome young leader, Pres. John F. Kennedy, made an eloquent address urging his countrymen to put a man on the moon by 1969. If this seems old-fashioned and sexist, it is. One of the virtues of Craig's film is how it zeros in on the man's world that was Kennedy's New Frontier. During the period covered (1969-72), women kept house, raised kids, and in the case of astronauts' wives, occasionally opened their lives to the media, especially the inexhaustible maul that was network TV during the Apollo space flights broadcast by the space buffs CBS anchor Walter Cronkite and ABC Science Editor Jules Bergman.
The hero of the piece is Wisconsin-born Navy aviator Gene Cernan, a one-time Apollo astronaut who, in the film's present-tense interview scenes, is a craggy-faced Texas rancher. If, in telling his story to us and his adult daughter, Cernan looks a tad haunted, it's because the Apollo Manned Spacecraft program had more than its share of near-misses and outright mishaps. Close buddies of his were burned alive in their space capsules.
In 1969, my 25-year-old self watched a man walk on the moon, an event that more than held its own with Woodstock, Stonewall and an early anti-Nixon Vietnam War rally in Washington. It'll sound impossibly corny, but it's true that you seldom realize the value of things until they're irretrievably lost. See Last Man on the Moon for its seldom-viewed home movies of young space jockeys at play, and for awe-inspiring NASA footage of takeoffs that are so bigger-than-life that you both grasp the dangers these men withstood and wish somehow we had public men and women capable of similar crazy dreams.
The film kept reminding me of companion space adventures such as the 1999-lensed October Sky, starring a young Jake Gyllenhaal as Homer Hickam, Jr., a Southern-raised, rocket-obsessed young man who, in the time of Sputnik, butted heads with a coal-mine foreman dad to turn himself into a future NASA scientist. Last Man is also for fans of big-budget space-program films The Right Stuff and the gripping rescue drama Apollo 13. I eagerly await a Castro Theatre triple bill.
But the greatest thing about Last Man on the Moon is its potential for reviving the dreamer in all of us. Skeptics scoff that the current NASA projects �" the Mars orbiter, etc. �" are literally light-years beyond our ability to wrap them into our country's agenda. Great movies inspire great dreams. Give this one a peek, and be prepared to be wowed.