The Last Man on the Moon

This is a great documentary about a great man.

Take a pinch of Top Gun, stir in a generous dollop of The Right Stuff, add a light sprinkling of Mad Men and you have the formula for this uplifting documentary portrait of former Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.

The film traces Cernan's career trajectory, going back to his days in San Diego as a hot-shot naval aviator, blending terrific archival footage with contemporary perspectives to quietly poetic effect.

The Last Man on the Moon is one of those movies we didn't realize we needed, but turns out to be just the thing for our fractured, cynical times.

Using a rich trove of archival footage and interviews with Cernan, members of his family, other former astronauts and key Apollo mission figures, director Mark Craig charts the flight path of Cernan’s life.

Cernan is proud of what he accomplished, calling himself the luckiest man in the world for all that he got to see. But he also expresses regret at having done it at the expense of his family.

This is not my favorite kind of documentary filmmaking. Eugene “Gene” Cernan, the subject of this film, who’s also the older fellow watching the bucking bronco, is a man deserving of a tribute such as this movie aspires to give him. The filmmakers, attempting to jazz up their material, get in the way a lot.

This is ultimately an unsatisfying recounting of the times and people. It is fairly straightforward and covers a lot of ground, meaning parts are sped through with little explanation. After a lot of family talk and ground footage, there is really quite little film of the actual last mission. I never found Cernan that relatable, he seems in the end like an elderly sports star trading on an amazing past that he was not really able to be articulate about. THat's not anyone's fault... but the film should've picked less to focus on and please people who were interested in the details of the moonshot program or complete a character study of someone that would reveal more. It was somewhere in-between.