Magnficent Desolation: Tom Hanks' Vision of Lunar Exploration

Magnificent Desolation is a new, forty minute 3D IMAX film produced by Tom Hanks which tells the story of the Apollo missions to the Moon. Hanks is famous for his role of astronaut Jim Lovell in the film Apollo 13 and was a moving force behind the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon which also told the story of Apollo.

The IMAX film uses archival video and 3D IMAX recreations to show what it was like to explore the Moon during the six Apollo expeditions to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972. The 3D images, enabled by special polarized glasses one is obliged to wear to see the film, are nothing short of spectacular.

A person seeing Magnificent Desolation will literally come as close to being on the lunar surface as anyone can get without actually going oneself. The flat, two dimensional images that one is used to from the video archive never did the moon walks justice. Through the magic of movie special effects, those of us who have been Earth bound all of our lives for the first time will see the Moon for what it is, a world but strange and familiar, with hills and valleys such as one could never encounter on our own planet.

The view of the Hadley Rill is especially awe inspiring, indeed a gasp for breath moment as the viewer sees for the first time how deep it was and what a sheer drop existed from the top to the valley below. At three hundred meters, Hadley Rill was deeper indeed, as the film demonstrates, than the Statue of Liberty is high.

The one complaint that one might have of the film is that it did not have more of these scenes. For instance, a "birds eye" view of Alan Shepherd's famous golf swing, which was immortalized in a painting by astronaut/artist Alan Bean, would have been great.

What Magnificent Desolation had a little too much of was some too cute enhancements. The sequence, short in a bare studio, of young children mangling the history of Apollo was somewhat difficult to watch. Did you know that Lance Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon? The only stand out was a little seven year old girl named Yolanda, who really wants to follow in the footsteps of Armstrong, Conrad, and Cernan when she grows up.