The trailer for “Apollo 11” is out, and the reviews for its premiere last week at Sundance are quite enthusiastic, so there’s a chance of it having more than the very limited theatrical release Sundance-selected documentaries usually get. Here’s hoping.

“It’s one thing to boast about the specs of these images, and quite another to see the spruced up footage for yourself. It’s rare that picture quality can inspire a physical reaction, but the opening moments of ‘Apollo 11,’ in which a NASA camera crew roams around the base of the rocket and spies on some of the people who’ve come to gawk at it from a beach across the water, are vivid enough to melt away the screen that stands between them. The clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”
– David Ehrlich, Indiewire

I was glad to see that, at least in the trailer, they used none of the footage previously seen in the 1972 “Moonwalk One” documentary.

“There was one guy, his name was Urs Furrer, and he was a well-known cameraman. He was a big guy – his name means ‘bear’ and he was big like a bear. I’d look for him because I knew that he could put this camera on his shoulder. I don’t know how much it weighed with a thousand feet of film on it; it was a ton. But he could use it like a handheld camera.”
– Theo Kamecke, director of “Moonwalk One”