The greatest space movie, according to Neil Armstrong
It’s difficult to make an accurate movie about the blank mystery of outer space, after all, only a handful of people in human history have had the fortune to visit the extraordinary plane. To be exact, only around 650 people have ever crossed the Kármán line marking the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Still, this hasn’t stopped countless filmmakers from trying to scientifically replicate the conditions of outer space, with Alfonso Cuarón adding painstaking detail to 2013’s Gravity, Christopher Nolan bringing a black hole to life in 2014’s Interstellar, and Ryan Gosling bonding with a rock on Project Hail Mary.
But who is the greatest judge of the accuracy of these movies? Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Damien Chazelle and other master filmmakers who have conquered fantastic space-themed films? Leading astrophysicists like Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Martin Rees and Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nada.
In our humble opinion, it is the experience of astronauts themselves that we should listen to regarding the greatest space movies, and there’s no better soul to consider than the very first person in human history to set foot on the moon. It remains a mind-bending accolade to this day. Imagine trying to top that trump card around the Christmas table!set
Taking “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” on July 21st 1969, Armstrong made human history when his Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the lunar surface, with the astronaut taking the first steps on the Wensleydale mere minutes before his partner Buzz Aldrin.
Alongside pilot Michael Collins, the trio’s efforts have long gone down as the most iconic and influential space mission of all time, changing the shape of life on Earth forever. But also changing our understanding of its dark abyss with Buzz Aldrin famously commenting, “Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.”
Having seen the black emptiness of space and the glittery pattern of stars first-hand, Armstrong came with good authority when he spoke to American film critic Gene Siskel about his favourite space-related movies.
“It’s the single best vision of space ever to come out of the movies,” Siskel gleamed in his retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film released just one year before Apollo 11 achieved the successful moon-walk. A feat of incredible science fiction filmmaking, Kubrick’s classic movie had an impact across the globe, with Siskel recalling a particularly special conversation he had with Armstrong about the flick.
Continuing, Siskel adds: “Don’t just take my word for it, a couple of months ago, I happened to be flying to Cincinnati seated next to Neil Armstrong, the astronaut, the first man to walk on the moon. Armstrong told me that of all the space movies, he liked 2001 the best, that it did a remarkable job of communicating what living and travelling through outer space is actually like”.
In response, Siskel’s on-screen partner Roger Ebert, rightly noted: “That must be the best review that Stanley Kubrick ever got for 2001”. You can’t say it fairer than that.
Widely appreciated as Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, follows the story of two astronauts and a supercomputer named H.A.L. 9000 who travel towards Jupiter to uncover the mysteries of human existence. An experimental, cinematically marvellous achievement, the film was based on the short story The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke, who also adapted his tale into the screenplay for the movie.
The meaning of 2001, according to Stanley Kubrick
Eerily, however, it not only depicted space with precision, but our obsession with the technology that gets us there. As Stanley Kubrick commented in 1980, “The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room.”
With awkward echoes of AI in our modern age, he continued, “And he has no sense of time. … [W]hen they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some kind of superman.”
With Kubrick notably concluding, “We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.”
