I own about a dozen documentaries covering the moon landings, being someone who remembers the endeavour from Apollo 8 onwards (collecting the newspaper clippings and building my plastic Saturn V) and this is easily the most watched in my collection. The atmospheric soundtrack allied with the voice-overs from the actual Apollo astronauts and flight controllers raise this above the others, giving a real insight into how it felt to be creating history. It's a great shame that some reviewers have seen fit to mark down this film because it doesn't do what the majority of the other documentaries do. For All Mankind is one of a kind and all the better for that.

The movie is a documentary, a chronicle of about nine NASA missions to the moon from 1968 to 1972, including the near disaster of Apollo 13 ("Houston, we had a problem here."). It is not important that there is not a great focus on any one particular space mission. After all, even if not exactly alike, the trips were similar. But how about those brave men, sitting atop a 300+ foot spaceship longer than the height of the Statue of Liberty . . . waiting for the rocket motors to blast-off . . . a big candle indeed! To make this wonderful movie, director Al Reinert mulled over six million feet of film and taped more than 80 hours of NASA interviews. Editor Susan Korda must have had much work to do.It all began in 1962 with President Kennedy's famous Texas speech. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." We had a supporting array of brilliant engineers at Houston. Our achievement was monumental.The film offers no professional narrative, no texts, and no talking heads. None of those are needed. Instead the story is told by Houston and the astronauts themselves. The footage speaks for itself. And it is beautifully set to music by Brian Eno. An astronaut plays Frank Sinatra's 1964 rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon." How apropos! Later we hear "The eagle has landed." What an experience: walking and hopping on the moon, rock hunting, securing the American flag! One of the astronauts tests Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies using a hammer and a feather. The Italian physicist was right! The film is dedicated to the 14 men and women who died. They include four Russians on two Soyuz missions, and the three astronauts who died in that terrible Apollo I fire in January 1967. Also there were the seven who perished in the Challenger in January 1986.I noticed that the end movie credit of Santo and Johnny Farina's 1959 top instrumental hit reads "Sleepwalking" instead of "Sleep Walk." But the movie version is the cover by Lee DeCarlo (who was also the film's post-production sound supervisor) and also Peter Manning Robinson. Maybe this version was renamed; it certainly does sound like the original Farina tune."For All Mankind" is recommended for everybody!

If you've loved, dreamt big, and witnessed death, this film might be for you.I've seen my share of films, and only a mere handful of them have transported me the way Al Reinert's "For All Mankind" (1989) does; enthralled me, elated me, stopped me in my tracks. The most extraordinary thing is that albeit films like "Zerkalo" (1975) directly address the cinematic function of dreams and memories in fictional terms, it is this film that most evocatively makes me see the insatiably curious child in myself, gazing at the sky, seeing the stars at night, wondering about the vastness of space, the insignificance of one's own existence in the grand scheme of things, both in space and in the great ocean of time. And at the same time, there's deep consolation in this otherwise bittersweet notion that after a mere instance we're gone. We live and dream and hope, and die, and our lives are very much like the deep blue marble seen from space by the astronauts, against the endless abyss of incomprehensibly vast darkness and nothingness. As said by one astronaut in the film, the Earth seems to give the dark space life; truly, then, the darkness of death gives meaning to the fleeting moment of life we as individuals experience here.Brian Eno's music is integral, opulent, and words don't do it justice. The images, and the way they are structured with the sounds, have to be experienced. We're lucky to have the film on Blu-ray in a superb transfer (Criterion has released it in Region A and the Masters of Cinema in Region B, using the exact same transfer).Some have criticized the lack of transparency in the narrative, making it difficult to distinguish between the different missions, but I don't see it as a problem at all. On the contrary, I find the narrative transparent enough, framed with Kennedy's dream, realized in the successes and failures of the Apollo program. The film therefore sees all the missions shown as the actualization of one vision and dream.

Watched it again last night, on the 35th anniversary of man's first walk on the moon. No need to reiterate what others have said here - it's simply a masterpiece, one of the finest, most moving documentaries ever made (especially compared to the half-witted hysterical polemics that pass for the form these days).It's sobering to think that the deeds recounted in this film are almost forgotten now. The Apollo program is arguably the pinnacle of human achievement, yet yesterday's anniversary passed with hardly a rememberance. I mentioned it to my wife, and she expressed skepticism that the moon landings ever took place! (to her credit, she watched the documentary with me). I consider myself fortunate to have lived in this time and in this place, and had the chance to watch as my countrymen, on behalf of all mankind, took our first, tentative steps on another world.