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Tom Hanks gives this account of the Apollo moon missions the personal touch as he narrates an immersive audiovisual documentary telling the story of the six successful manned landings – a very personal review by Martin Jameson.

While I wasn’t allowed to stay up for the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface at getting on for 4am on the morning of July 21st 1969, I had been glued to our fuzzy black and white telly at 9.17pm (BST) the night before. My stepmother was out at some meeting or other and I remember her pulling onto the drive in her rattly Rose Taupe Morris Minor a few minutes later, just as it was getting dark. I ran outside to greet her. ‘They’ve landed on the moon!’ I shrieked, a nine-year-old space nut, obsessed with everything about the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs. It wasn’t just the guys at Mission Control who had ‘been about to turn blue’. My stepmother nodded, trying to look impressed. She had a lot on her mind. Fifty-seven years later, I still have all my space annuals from those heady, idealistic days.

In light of this indelible memory, I was unlikely to be disappointed to see the associated film and photography from 1969-1972 towering above me and wrapping around me a full 360 degrees, with the homely drawl of Tom Hanks (only four years older) reliving exactly the same childhood enthusiasm I had experienced – complete with the exactly the same frustration at not being able to enthuse the rest of his family. I’m not gonna lie (as Nessa from Gavin and Stacey might say) but I shed a tear or two at the visceral sense of both the joy and pain of childhood it evoked, simultaneously so close that I could touch it, and so far away, I could sense it about to disappear forever.

Having said that, it could be argued that The Moonwallkers adds almost nothing to the canon of Apollo related media. There is very little content I wasn’t already aware of, and at just an hour – with barely any mention of the ill-fated Apollo 1 and 13 missions, nor the spiritual significance of the Apollo 8 bible reading on Christmas Eve 1968 – it’s little more than a sanitised bluffer’s guide, only on a humungous scale.

But, despite these shortcomings, I found it to be an exhilarating and, at times, a profound experience. The most powerful visual moments come in the penultimate segment documenting the later and often forgotten missions – the ones with the Lunar Rover that were able to really explore, reminding us of quite how far astronauts like Gene Cernan were able to travel from the Lunar module.  Breathtaking lunar panoramas surround the viewer and we’re able to experience the stomach churning scale of what they saw rather than simply the claustrophobic thrill of Armstrong’s hair-raising and well documented 1969 landing.

Of course, as I’ve already said, I have personal reason to be moved. I share Hanks’s generational experience of those amazing days, but I think there’s something else that makes this event more significant than it knows, or could have anticipated. The account of the Apollo missions and the show’s seeming raison d’etre is the prospect of the upcoming Artemis project taking humans back to the lunar surface. To frame the story, they run JFK’s famous 1962 speech at Rice University. ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,’ the President said, ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard…’ His words never fail to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Later, in an equally spine tingling moment, we are reminded of the plaque left by the crew of Apollo 11 at the Sea of Tranquility. It read: ‘We come in peace for all mankind.’

Sitting in Manchester’s Aviva Studios, I had hoped to escape the visceral fear that Donald Trump’s expansionist ambitions had been stirring in me all day. Following the attack on Venezuela the weekend before, and a day of threats of a military takeover of Greenland, the idea of the next human step into the cosmos being performed in the name of what is fast becoming a hostile and monstrous empire, with the help of Donald Trump’s billionaire Tech Bro chums, I wept at the lost idealism of those pioneering days. Of course, the subtext of Kennedy’s words was the Cold War, just as the U.S. was becoming entrenched in Vietnam, but the idealism of the scientists and astronauts shone, precisely because they were genuinely trying to say and do something to supersede these petty earthly conflagrations.

However hard lovable Tom Hanks tries to persuade us, it’s impossible to see these new missions in the same light. For Trump and MAGA America this about ownership and power, and any claims to plant a new flag ‘for all mankind’ will ring painfully – and tragically – hollow.

Verdict: The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks certainly has its shortcomings, but it’s still well worth checking out, because it is spectacular and it does speak to bigger things… but for a truly gripping nuts and bolts account of the Apollo program make sure to catch up with the excellent BBC podcast series, Thirteen Minutes to the Moon. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com