New U.S. Release
Posted: Wed., Oct. 5, 2005, 5:33pm PT

Magnificent Desolation: Walking On The Moon
(Docu -- Imax)

By JOE LEYDON

Arguably the most avid space buff and NASA booster among contemporary
pop culture icons, Tom Hanks enjoyed significant commercial and critical
success through his involvement with Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" and his
own "From the Earth to the Moon" HBO miniseries. But his third time
isn't a charm: "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon" is an
earnest but insubstantial Imax 3-D spectacle that, even at 40 minutes,
seems unduly padded. Obviously aimed at schoolchildren likely to be
bused in for matinee screenings, docu offers grown-ups very little that
is fresh or insightful, and too much that is facile or hokey.

Pic comes off a hodgepodge of breathless hero worship, cutesy history
lessons and melodramatic re-enactments, with a side order of vocational
guidance for impressionable youngsters. During an early montage of kids
being grilled about NASA history, it's meant to be hilarious that most
of them know little about the history of U.S. space exploration. (At
least one confuses Neil Armstrong with Lance Armstrong.)

At the end, however, narrator Hanks sounds a dead-serious note of
inspirational encouragement when he asks: Who will be the next explorer
to walk on the moon? "Maybe that person is watching right now," he says.
"Maybe the future walker is you."

"Magnificent Desolation" pays heartfelt tribute to 12 Apollo astronauts
who visited the moon between 1969 and 1972. But the actual missions are
represented mostly in fuzzy TV news clips shown in tiles that
sporadically "float" across the massive Imax screen.

Director Mark Cowen places greater emphasis on aggressively dramatic
re-creations, which are used to illustrate Apollo mission highlights --
and, not incidentally, fill the entire frame with striking 3-D imagery.
(Tech values are undeniably impressive.)

And while pic does include a few key recordings of actual astronaut
dialogue, well-known actors (including, most effectively, Morgan Freeman
and Bill Paxton) are employed to read salient quotes by the real-life
moon men throughout pic. The unfortunate result is, the slick artifice
tends to overshadow the real astronauts.

Ironically, verisimilitude of the Imax-size re-enactments indirectly
lends a kind of credence to long-circulated conspiracy theories
(mockingly acknowledged elsewhere in pic) that the Apollo voyages didn't
really occur, but actually were faked on a Hollywood soundstage.

And speaking of fake: Hanks takes a shameless approach to revving aud
interest by dramatizing a "What if?" scenario involving unforeseen
catastrophe during a moon mission.

Title refers to Apollo astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin's description of
lunar landscape.