The final frontier. Today we have a tendency to take the miracle of space flight for granted: a 60-year history, hundreds of launches a year, and thousands of manmade objects in orbit have made it almost routine. But, decades ago, we recognized space flight for the miracle that it is, treated it as a global spectacle and the triumph of Man. Brian Eno, with assistance from Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois, celebrates this triumph and treats it with the reverence it deserves in For All Mankind.
The documentary opens with shots of the imposing monolithic Apollo shuttles, towering hundreds of feet above the earth. Eno’s dark, rumbling ambient synth is reminiscent of scenes from a horror film, highlighting the danger, the fear, and the awe that the structures of space flight invoke. The Apollo programs were the first of their kind, taking Man to the moon, and were fraught with worry at their impossibility and the dangers inherent in the unknown.
The majority of the documentary and Eno’s score revel in humanity’s accomplishment of spaceflight until curiosity of the beauty of the universe takes over. Eno fills these segments with warm open synths, droning as the audience, and the astronauts, become overwhelmed by a sense of wonder, entranced by space’s vastness, the alien surface of the moon, and the fading view of earth as it disappears over some nonexistent horizon.
