They are the men who for four short years between the late 1960s and the early 1970s traveled farther than any explorer before or since. They are the Apollo astronauts, and not all of them walked on the moon; some, like Michael Collins, remained in orbit while their compatriots took the historic steps down below. But they all remain the only human beings ever to see the Earth as a distant world small enough to be hidden from view by a thumb held at arm's length. And though this documentary examining their experiences does have more than its share of spectacular images from their missions�from full-color footage of the Saturn V ascending into orbit to grainier footage of spacesuited men gallumphing about in lunar gravity�it's those faces, those eyes, those articulately spoken memories that you'll remember longest.

Don't look for Neil Armstrong. He never gives interviews, not even for an event like this one. He's described as "reclusive," but the admiration these other men feel for him is palpable. He's remembered as perhaps the most level-headed guy alive, a matter-of-fact professional who at one point during his training bailed out of a test vehicle seconds before he would have been killed, then went to the office to catch up on his paperwork. Asked if he'd indeed crashed that day, he looked up from his work, said yes and looked back down. This is a quality you want in the man you send to the moon.

Buzz Aldrin, marveling over the presence of mind Armstrong showed when delivering the famous "One small step for a man" line, admits that he wouldn't have been nearly that articulate himself, claiming that he would have made the history books read something more like "Woo hoo! I'm on the moon!"

Real men on an astounding journey

The stories told by these men are surefire cures for banality. In the early reels it occurred to this reviewer, not for the first time, that Michael Collins must have been the loneliest man in the universe, so far from Earth and separated from the two who got to descend to the lunar surface. What a clever thought, right? Or so it seems until Collins complains about so often hearing that very same line from others and calls it silly: How lonely could he be with Mission Control "yammering" (his word) in his ear all the time? He also reveals the speech prepared for President Nixon in case something happened and Armstrong and Aldrin were unable to lift off for the flight home: something about men who went to the moon in peace now remaining on the moon to rest in peace.

The bulk of the reminscences deal with Apollo 11 (the first one to the moon) and 13 (the near-disaster that ended when the crew defied the odds by returning home safely). Astronauts from other missions, like Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and John Young chime in between those remiscences, their own observations echoing those of the better-known marquee names. They are all wry, matter-of-fact and self-deprecating. One of the more startling reminiscences is a story about Gus Grissom deciding not to complain about the faulty wiring that later contributed to the fire that killed him and the rest of the crew of Apollo 1; allegedly he was afraid of being booted off the mission.

But it's the sheer wonder of the thing that gets to you, the degree to which this great enterprise united mankind for the five minutes it took more jaded reactions to set in. We see footage of awestruck, delighted, almost transcendentally wondering faces from all over the world. We see the normally measured Walter Cronkite break down in mid-sentence with a gulp of sheer joy. (Back then, newsmen were allowed to show unscripted human affect.) We see the religious awakening of one astronaut and the environmental awakening of others. And we hear Alan Bean saying that he has never once complained about the weather since the day he saw it from a distance.