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The cast of a gig like this doesn't need famous faces, mainly because those faces would all be hidden behind the opaque visors of the lunar helmets. But there's no shortage of famous voices. John Travolta, Matt Damon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Scott Glenn can all be heard reading the real moon walkers' historic reflections as the movie moon walkers explore the faux surface. The plum role--NASA nobleman Neil Armstrong--is voiced by Hollywood nobleman Morgan Freeman. Armstrong's characteristically minimalist style suited the actor. "Morgan looked at Armstrong's lines, nodded and said, 'O.K., let's do this,'" says director Mark Cowen.
That's an awful lot of cinematic firepower for what is essentially a 40-min. boutique movie, and even Hanks has only so many favor chits to play. The reason he spends them on projects like this, he says, has less to do with his childhood love of space than with his lack of the temperament to pursue space as a career. "I took an observational astronomy course when I was in junior college," he says, "which essentially involved looking through a telescope. I loved it and aced it and then moved on to Astronomy 101, which was all math and theorems. I dropped it in a week."
Hanks isn't the first to discover that there's a difference between rapture and rigor. The late Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13, said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to fly to the moon--a certain engineer's detachment from the outrageousness of the undertaking--disqualified them to speak about it terribly lyrically. Hanks, with lyricism to burn, decided to make the most of his astronomical talents.
"These days," he says, "I see myself as sort of a cosmic park ranger. I'm that guy who shows up when you're sitting around a campfire and starts telling you about what happened on this mountain 10 million years ago. All at once, it's a whole new experience."
The key to capturing that kind of experience in Magnificent Desolation was piling up as much detail as possible. The title itself has historical resonance--it's an exquisite oxymoron coined by Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin as he stepped onto the surface of the moon and took his first look around. To ensure that the rest of the film had the same historical pointillism, Hanks recruited Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott--who also served as a consultant on Hanks' other space projects--to explain how to do everything from operating the module control stick to walking in one-sixth G to maneuvering around another grimy, unshaven, bulky-spacesuit-wearing man in a lunar-module interior no bigger than two telephone booths. Hanks and Cowen then went heavy on the handheld, point-of-view shots and layered on the 3-D. The result is an IMAX movie writ even larger than most. With intercuts of archival footage, Hanks' narration and commentary by contemporary kids, it is a glorious tutorial on all things lunar.