07-06-2019, 03:52 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-06-2019, 03:58 PM by TM2YC. Edited 1 time in total.)
The Secrets of Scott's Hut (2011)
Affable TV explorer Ben Fogle accompanies a team working to document and restore the 100 year old base camp of “Scott of the Antarctic” in this feature length BBC Documentary. Eerily, the extreme cold has almost preserved the hut and it’s contents like it was 5-minutes after the explorers went home. Frozen dogs still chained up, a century old rancid butter etc signs of life but no one there living. It might just be me but I couldn't help recalling John Carpenter's 'The Thing'. The velvet voice of Sir Kenneth Branagh reads extracts from Scott’s journals.
Apollo 11 (2019)
Astonishing newly discovered 70mm footage bookends this document of the 1969 NASA mission. Director Todd Douglas Miller combines the brilliant Asif Kapadia technique of only using contemporaneous footage and audio, with a visceral 93-minute ride, clearly patterned after Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer's work in 'Interstellar' and 'Dunkirk'. The opening section leading up to and during the launch is worth the price of admission alone (and should be seen on the big screen). This 70mm Documentary footage is as beautiful as anything ever filmed for a fictional space movie. It captures the mind-boggling scale of the Saturn V rocket like nothing I've seen before but also gets up close to every line of worry in the faces of the NASA engineers. All the shots of people in headsets looking at 60s consoles, backed by disembodied radio chatter was oddly like watching George Lucas' 'THX 1138'.
Unfortunately the film then chooses to follow the astronauts to the moon for most of it's run-time, where no such quality footage exists. So we fall back on blurry videotape, 16mm black and white and still photographs. It doesn't feel like anything we haven't seen before a hundred times, incredible as this story is. They get back to earth (spoilers), credits roll and underneath them is more of that amazing 70mm showing the rocket being constructed (the whole cinema stayed in their seats to see every last frame of it). Why couldn't they have worked with what they had and so concentrated on the experience of the ground crew? I understand they had days of the stuff to work with. It's still a great film experience though and Matt Morton's epic synth score gets the heart pounding.
^ The trailer is uploaded in 4K
(it's almost entirely the 70mm stuff).
Affable TV explorer Ben Fogle accompanies a team working to document and restore the 100 year old base camp of “Scott of the Antarctic” in this feature length BBC Documentary. Eerily, the extreme cold has almost preserved the hut and it’s contents like it was 5-minutes after the explorers went home. Frozen dogs still chained up, a century old rancid butter etc signs of life but no one there living. It might just be me but I couldn't help recalling John Carpenter's 'The Thing'. The velvet voice of Sir Kenneth Branagh reads extracts from Scott’s journals.
Apollo 11 (2019)
Astonishing newly discovered 70mm footage bookends this document of the 1969 NASA mission. Director Todd Douglas Miller combines the brilliant Asif Kapadia technique of only using contemporaneous footage and audio, with a visceral 93-minute ride, clearly patterned after Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer's work in 'Interstellar' and 'Dunkirk'. The opening section leading up to and during the launch is worth the price of admission alone (and should be seen on the big screen). This 70mm Documentary footage is as beautiful as anything ever filmed for a fictional space movie. It captures the mind-boggling scale of the Saturn V rocket like nothing I've seen before but also gets up close to every line of worry in the faces of the NASA engineers. All the shots of people in headsets looking at 60s consoles, backed by disembodied radio chatter was oddly like watching George Lucas' 'THX 1138'.
Unfortunately the film then chooses to follow the astronauts to the moon for most of it's run-time, where no such quality footage exists. So we fall back on blurry videotape, 16mm black and white and still photographs. It doesn't feel like anything we haven't seen before a hundred times, incredible as this story is. They get back to earth (spoilers), credits roll and underneath them is more of that amazing 70mm showing the rocket being constructed (the whole cinema stayed in their seats to see every last frame of it). Why couldn't they have worked with what they had and so concentrated on the experience of the ground crew? I understand they had days of the stuff to work with. It's still a great film experience though and Matt Morton's epic synth score gets the heart pounding.
^ The trailer is uploaded in 4K
