My favourite image from this big-screen moon-landing documentary was one I, an avowed space enthusiast, had never seen. It’s footage from the crowd on the Florida coast, gathered on July 16, 1969, to watch the launch of Apollo 11. A woman gazes up, and in her glasses is reflected a bright new transitory star, rising, rising, rising. And then gone.

Everyone knows about the voyage of Apollo 11. You might have seen Ryan Gosling in First Man, the Neil Armstrong biopic that won an Oscar for visual effects. You may recall 2007’s In the Shadow of the Moon, which featured interviews with most of the lunar voyagers, or the 2005 Imax 3D film Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon.

But you haven’t seen it like this. Director Todd Douglas Miller chanced upon a cache of large-format footage, never before seen, and a separate collection of 11,000 hours of audio recordings capturing the voices of individual mission control personnel. So there are sights and sounds guaranteed to be new.

And while the heart-pounding launch footage is incredible, there are marvellous, much quieter moments to savour: Collins adjusting his skullcap and microphone before suiting up for the launch; a glimpse of science-fiction author Isaac Asimov strolling through the crowd on launch day; a three-and-a-half-minute single shot of the view from the Eagle lander as it descended from 13 kilometres to a feather-soft landing in the Sea of Tranquility.

And we hear Mother Country, a Johnny Cash-esque ballad sung by folk artist John Stewart, on Buzz Aldrin’s tape player on the way to the moon. (No road trip or space trip is complete without a mix tape.) Miller lets it play in the original tinny NASA audio recording before letting it build into a kind of soundtrack for the film and the landing: “They were just a lot of people doing the best they could … and the people cheered. Why, I even saw a grown man break right down and cry.”

You may get a catch in your throat watching the mission, a historical event almost 50 years old, but so vibrant it might have been shot yesterday. Miller doesn’t bother with onscreen explanations (except countdown clocks) or modern interviews. He just lights the fuse and lets us hang on for the ride of a lifetime. cknight@postmedia.com