Review: The Last Man on the Moon
Posted by Anura Samara, 2 June 2016
Stephen and I took ourselves off to see The Last Man on the Moon – both the film and the man.
Space travel is like polar exploration once was – a perilous journey into the unknown with no support available. There have been lots of documentaries and movies on the subject, but so many of them are purely about the journey to space and back, not what happens before and afterwards.
Steve has a deep interest in all things about space, so I thought the Last Man on the Moon show at the Canberra Theatre would be a good opportunity to see and hear from someone who really knows what space is like.
The first half of the show was a screening of the film The Last Man on the Moon
. This is not your typical documentary about space travel. Instead, it shows how a young Gene Cernan went from growing up on his grandparents’ farm to Navy pilot and then astronaut, with three trips in to space under his belt before finally becoming ‘the last man on the moon’. It’s also about his relationships with his friends, his wives and daughter and the last impact of the experience. And it also gives him time to muse about what it means to be the last man to stand on the moon.
I enjoyed the film. It had a slow and gentle pace and didn’t feel the need to engender some sense of drama (for example, Cernan was involved in a helicopter crash that could have scuppered his chance of going to space, he originally was selected for a trip when his friends on the primary crew were killed in a fire, he had a perilous space walk). It also gave plenty of time to the personal dimension with his first wife talking about the impact of the space programme and his later fame on the family.
Cernan admits that he finds it hard to believe when looking up at the moon that he was actually there. Seeing him on stage, I felt the same – he came across as a down-to-earth sort of guy, with close friends he likes to hang out with and his fair share of mistakes which he freely admits to.
The second have of the show was a Q&A session hosted by Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith, CSIRO’s Project Scientist for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), where she asked him a range of questions; there was also an opportunity for audience members to ask questions. In the final part of the show, he was joined on stage by his friend who we had seen in the film.
The show was engrossing. Despite his age, Cernan has clear memories of his time in the space programme. The tendency in all documentaries on space travel is for the presenters to wax lyrical about the meaning of it all, about some deep philosophical impact of being on the moon or the grand science underpinning it all. The Last Man on the Moon was a more human story – Cernan doesn’t promote his achievements, allowing some of the negatives of his life to balance them and focussing more on the people around him that his own story.
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