For All Mankind (1989)
Apollo Associates

Description

In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy's challenge of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Breathtaking both in the scope of its vision and the exhilaration of the human emotions it captures, For All Mankind is the story of the 24 men who traveled to the Moon-told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences.

Collected reviews and ratings

10 The Digital Bits | Bill Hunt

For All Mankind is probably the greatest single documentary ever made on the Apollo missions to the moon. Its beauty lies in its simplicity.
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10 Reel | Robert Payne

Light-years beyond reenactment dramas like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, For All Mankind gives us glorious, firsthand experience of what it really must have felt like to travel to and walk on the moon.
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9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Joshua Klein

For All Mankind captures the sense of wonder absent from false science-fiction product like Armageddon, which pales in comparison to this.
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9.0 DVD Town | Henning Moelbaek

I'll admit it, liking space stuff (which I do) is necessary to like this film, but if you do, it's a really great experience.
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8.3 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

So why does the movie feel less wondrous than it might have? In part because the image of man in space has, in just one generation, become routine, an established part of our imaginative vocabulary. We've seen this stuff so often on television that it's no longer revelatory.
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8.0 Washington Post | Rita Kempley

It's the best of Apollo culled from 80 hours of interviews and 6 million feet of archival film. Mercifully there are no talking heads, no dry statistics, no toxic narration, only the cosmic gist told through the fluent reflections of the two dozen voyagers who came face to face with the man in the moon.
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7.5 Time Out

The footage is astonishingly good. It begins with an early launch filmed from every conceivable angle, and in such fine detail that you'd be forgiven for thinking George Lucas and his effects team had a hand in the making.
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6.7 digitallyobsessed.com | Kurt Easterwood

As impressive an editing job as he has put together, Reinert's narrative intentions are also what troubled me most about For All Mankind, and what left an unsatisfied taste in my mouth despite being amazed, excited, and moved by what I saw. Presented with some of the most breathtaking, inspiring, and quite literally out of this world footage ever shot, Reinert didn't have enough trust in the material to let it speak for itself.
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