A smoogery of footage and audio from the Apollo manned moon missions, some of it great, much of it overly familiar. Too often I wanted to know who was speaking and that got increasingly frustrating, as did the authentically hokey bits and fatuous narration. Despite that it could've gone much longer. Brian Eno's incidental music is too obtrusive, worse than Vangelis's for Cosmos (1980), or perhaps it was Carl Sagan's tonsils that made the difference; these space cowboys declaimed like schoolboys. Over two nights.
Caryn James for the New York Times at the time: "It's not a bad idea to ignore the narration ... the better to appreciate its astonishing visual spectacle." Terrence Rafferty in 2009 (?): "At first ... you wonder whose voice it is, but after a while you stop wondering." Or maybe you don't. Achieved essentially Soviet collectivism through elision of individuality.
