The film's disconcerting implication is that America has never emerged from this shadow, we've never capitalized on our moon landing's promise nor equaled (let alone surpassed) the wondrous -- if ultimately empty -- achievement. Beneath In the Shadow of the Moon's celebratory surface is a bittersweet document of a bygone era's promise -- "a time when America made bold moves" under the guidance of visionaries like JFK -- and the brutal period (sprinkled with triumph) that emerged a few years later. Sington never harps on this angle -- he's too classy, though not clueless -- but it's there in the Apollo astronauts' offhand remarks, like when one implies America has now lost its sense of kinship with the rest of the world that was engendered by the landing.
Sington alternates mesmeric archival footage (a spaceship's many violent interactions with its environments, all-encompassing plumes of smoke and dust and fire, take on an abstract expressionism) with a handful of interviews (restricted to the astronauts; notably absent is reclusive Neil Armstrong). Their recollections are vivid, and the insights formed in their brief abandonment of terrestrial life (e.g. about a celestial power existing beyond religion, about humanity's molecular kinship with the universe, about Earth's fragility, its insignificance, the glorious respite it provides from an inhospitable galaxy) are often profound. The astronauts inspire via their humility and pragmatism and sheer exploratory accomplishment, but there's no escaping the moon landing as a short-lived balm for a country that was mired in assassinations, war, corrupt politicians, and race riots. A big, expensive, uplifting distraction. An entertainment.
