McConaugheyMay Day 1: Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon

I have returned! After being too beaten down by life to actually follow through on Hooptober and my, frankly, insane choice to watch 31 movies with "August" in the title for the month of August, I am back to the bit that had my friends offering mental health check-ins: watching a McConaughey movie every day this month. As ever, I'll be prioritizing movies I haven't seen, though I did have to slot in a couple rewatches, nearly all of which I haven't seen in at least 3+ years.

I found it meaningful to start with this movie, an IMAX pseudo-doc narrated by Tom Hanks about the Apollo moon missions because, like these historically-impactful and unbelievably courageous men, I am also putting my life at risk in the pursuit of some nebulous accomplishment. Will I find some value in this that can be applied to other aspects of life the way the technology built for the moon entered our daily lives? Or will I find nothing but dust and rocks and emptiness, leaving a bootprint behind on a surface so utterly unremarkable but for the fact that we believed it to be otherwise?

This is a movie in which McConaughey has two lines in which he reads from an interview (diary?) of astronaut Al Bean. This isn't really a movie, insofar as there is no real plot, and nothing that would meaningfully distinguish it from any amount of educational content. That said, there are some interesting textures. There's a lengthy mid-point where it feels like Tom Hanks gets bored and comes up with a What-If scenario in which the astronauts have to make a dangerous sprint back to the ship after their moon ranger explodes. This has never happened and it’s unlikely that it ever will happen, but Tom Hanks’ breathless narration is the closest this project comes to achieving any sort of suspense. Magnificent Desolation ends with a future moon colonizer concept art made mostly in what feels like '90s-era CD rom tech, and spends a lot more time than you'd expect talking about the moon landing conspiracy. That all makes it even funnier that I watched it on YouTube with the description reading: "A film about 12 Americans, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Dave Scott and other guys who allegedly walked the surface of the moon, in the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972." Fascinating how much weight “allegedly” takes up in that sentence.

There’s one incredible (I presume accidental) joke when they're asking three creepy-looking redhead triplets who walked on the moon and one kid stutters out "Jim?" And another boy says "Carrey?" These little freak cinephiles conflated Carrey's performance in Man on the Moon with an actual astronaut. This is a kid who would have gone crazy on Letterboxd for sure.

Starting this month-long journey with a movie(?) in which the subject of a marathon says two entire lines and doesn't appear on camera might, to a smart man, represent something. I never said I was smart, but I am stubborn. I'll see you for 31 days or I'll see you in hell.