Starring Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Jim Lovell. Rated G. Opens Friday, October 5, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

What I remember most about Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon were those terrible few moments when contact was lost between Houston and the lunar landing module. Had Apollo 11 crashed, and was everyone on it dead? The joy of discovering that the mission was, in fact, a complete success was overwhelming.

Or at least it was initially. I was in Connecticut at the time; by nightfall, local newscasters had turned one of the greatest moments in human history into something as narrow, tawdry, and jingoistic as just another "victory" over the Vietcong.

Remarkably, David Sington's documentary account of the men who successfully visited a celestial body other than our own manages to re-create the magic that media blowhards tried to dispel. Combining well-chosen archival footage and what can only be described as blissful interviews with Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, and the other astronauts who made extra-orbital space travel a reality, the director makes these epochal events seem more real than ever before.

Two things, in particular, will strike viewers who have been conditioned to believe that the Apollo program was just a marriage of convenience between training and technology. The first is that so many of the operating systems were then-unknown quantities, and the men who manipulated them had to blindly figure out how they worked as they went along.

Second, the experience seems to have hard-wired an almost Sufi-like ecstasy into every astronaut's brain. Again and again we hear transnational, nondenominational accounts of mystical rapture.

Cold and uninviting as our satellite might be, In the Shadow of the Moon actually makes you want to visit the damn place. Even more importantly, it makes us appreciate more fully how precious our own planet really is.