I saw this documentary off Netflix the other day, and I hope this is the right one, since there were several options on IMDb for "Rocket Men". Just a coincidence that I watched this only a couple days before seeing the recent premiere of the mini-series, "The Astronaut Wives Club", which I referred to as "The Right Stuff: The Feminist Revisionist Version"- basically that same story from the perspectives of the women in the various different astronauts' wives in the Mercury and Apollo (and Gemini perhaps??) space programs.

"Rocket Men" is also a good companion piece to TRS, basically showing a lot of the same events in documentary format of course. The film even goes into the Challenger and Columbia disasters a bit. I especially liked the narration by actor, Michael J. Reynolds. Like Levon Helm's narration in TRS, it provided a very down-to-earth homey feel to a literally out of this world subject. But I definitely enjoyed this- found it quite mesmerizing in fact. Again, I hope this is the right movie I'm reviewing-?? LOL

I guess the title says it all. Why do space documentaries have to be so bad? Of all the ones ever made, I can only think of a few that are anything but irritating. I was there, I remember. And the music! God who writes this stuff? This particular attempt fails on every level. It fails as history, it fails as nostalgia, it fails as entertainment. The filmmaking technique is amateurish - poor film to video transfer, poor editing, poor choice of material. But the main thing is that it is somehow viscerally irritating. Of the list of things that do not need any window dressing, the Space Race must be on top. So one wonders how, again and again and again, documentary filmmakers manage to get it so wrong. Don't waste time on this turkey - see "In the Shadow of the Moon" and its companion pieces about the engineering effort, "Moon Machines".

-drl

This film thrilled and moved me like nothing before it. If I had to choose between owning this film and owning every other movie in the world, I'd choose this film.

Every movie or TV show about space claims to convey "the wonder of space." But this film manages to actually DO that.

Spectacular shots! "The best views a rocketman has ever seen."

The film is immensely entertaining, down to the tense moments before the moon landing, which had its own real-life version of the bomb-on-a- timer device used in lesser movies.

I wish I were alive in the 60s, so that I could have seen all this as it happened.