Near the midpoint of In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary of the Apollo missions that was recently released on DVD, the filmmakers present a tense moment during the Apollo 11 lunar module’s first descent to the surface. “Program alarm!” Neil Armstrong says. “1202. 1202. … Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.”

The Apollo program is remembered as the gold standard of modern technological achievement, the most dramatic example of innovation applied toward a noble end. In this moment, though, as a guidance computer less powerful than a Commodore 64 alerts the astronauts that radar data is coming faster than it can process, and ground officers tell the astronauts to “go” nonetheless, the technology seems like a bit player in a story about human force of will.

We’re nearing the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, and since 1969 the humanity of the moon landings has faded somewhat from the general imagination, a situation that In the Shadow of the Moon tries to remedy. It does so by way of interviews with ten Apollo astronauts, archival footage, and little else—there’s no narration aside from that of the astronauts, and there are only a few explanatory titles.

It surprised me that this film hadn’t already been made years ago. There have been countless fictionalizations of the lunar missions, many of them quite powerful, but in retrospect, isn’t In the Shadow an obvious concept? Only a handful of people have ever been to the moon, so why not get them together and have them share their impressions of the place?

Thankfully, director David Sington was thoughtful enough to do that, and the result is a treasury of intimate, personal stories about men rather than mankind. Like this recollection from Edgar Mitchell, who got to walk on the moon but whose most vivid memory came on the return flight:

The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: the earth, the moon, the sun, and a whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was the powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners were prototyped — manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness. It wasn’t “them and us,” it was, “that’s me.” It’s all, it’s all — it’s one thing!

Each of the participating Apollo astronauts gets ample screen time, but In the Shadow places a particular focus on Apollo 11, and I was often struck by the insights of that mission’s Command Module Pilot, Michael Collins:

It’s not a question of, you’re scared all the time, but it is — you’re mildly worried all the time, or at least I was. You know, you’re not sure all these things are going to work properly! And there’s a hell of a lot of them coming in a very fragile daisy chain, and you don’t want any of the links in that chain to break because downstream from that broken link they’re all useless. So, yes, you’re worried, you’re concerned.

Throughout the archival footage in the film, I repeatedly wondered how engineers managed to make the flimsy, archaic-looking machinery perform on a trip with so little room for error. It was nice to hear that the astronauts might have felt the same way.

After a detailed recounting of Apollo 11, In the Shadow meanders. Perhaps because the Tom Hanks film has become such an icon, there’s only a brief discussion of Apollo 13, and even that short interlude is unnecessarily hushed and cryptic—my wife, watching the movie with me, had to ask, “They’re talking about Apollo 13, right?” I’m not sure if the filmmakers were reticent to include that mission or if the astronauts hesitated to discuss it, but the omission is odd.

The interviewees tread carefully when speaking of Neil Armstrong’s post-Apollo reclusiveness. It’s hard not to feel Armstrong’s absence, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his lack of participation hurts the film.

My biggest complaint about In the Shadow is that its 100-minute running time isn’t long enough. The Apollo 11 story is well-told, but I got a sense that there were fascinating stories to be told about all of the Apollo missions, and I would relish the opportunity to hear them from the men who were there. To its credit, though, In the Shadow isn’t intended as a chronicle of our trips to the moon. It’s an oral history of the experience of traveling to the moon from a flesh-and-blood perspective. For a tech-obsessed gearhead like myself, this is a refreshing—maybe even necessary—take on our exploration of space.