“The last will be first, and the first will be last.”

~ Matthew 20:16 (NIV)

This is an older film coming from 2014, made just a few years before Eugene (Gene) Cernan’s passing in 2017. Unlike the biography Armstrong (2019) we see and hear Cernan tell his story. (Armstrong was made after the first man on the moon’s passing, so necessitated another narrator—in this case, Harrison Ford.)

The film opens with a Western rodeo scene like something out of Yellowstone, which I figured had something to do with the tumbling and tossing inside a lunar module. But I didn’t find it the most effective opening for a Toronto boy who only rode a horse once as a kid at a stable near the ski resorts along Niagara Escarpment. Other rural scenes could have been trimmed a bit, even if they were trying to portray how the retired down-to-earth astronaut Gene Cernan connected with his outstanding adventures in space.

Like Armstrong, we get the message that the space explorer’s life is incredibly demanding with non-stop workdays leading up to the launch, leaving little room for family and friends beyond the NASA circle. Not too many of us would see the astronaut’s life as a life of sacrifice and selfishness but as Cernan grew older, that’s how he came to understand it. Meanwhile, his daughter gradually came to better appreciate just why her dad was around so little when she was a girl.

Eugene A. Cernan, 1969 – Cernan traveled into space as pilot of Gemini 9A in June 1966, as lunar module pilot of Apollo 10 in May 1969, and as commander of Apollo 17 in December 1972, the final Apollo lunar landing.

This is a good film that I watched over the course of two days. The closing minutes, with remastered lunar footage, were most gripping for me.

Recommended as a suitable backdrop to the upcoming Artemis mission, where an international crew of men and women plan to make a return voyage to our silvery neighbor in the sky.