Moon Struck

By Jeffrey Kluger / Santa Monica

Tom Hanks remembers the precise moment the moon made his head explode--or at least that's how he describes it. It was December 1972, and Hanks ran home from school to see the transmissions that the Apollo 17 astronauts were beaming back live from the surface of the moon. "There was no lunar module in sight," Hanks says. "All you could see were the astronauts in the distance as the camera panned around this incredibly alien, incredibly desolate place. I was just gone."

A lot of boomers--especially boy boomers--snapped their terrestrial moorings the same way back then. But in the 33 years of space travel that followed--33 years defined by a fallow manned program and two lost shuttle crews--most of them shook off their moon bliss entirely. Not so Hanks.

At 49 years old, the actor, director and producer has made something of a second career out of spreading the lunar word, first with his star turn in 1995's Apollo 13, then with his 1998 HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. Now Hanks is working the space beat again, preparing for this month's release of Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, co-produced by IMAX and Hanks' own production company, Playtone. A 3-D, 70-mm, giant-screen spectacle that Hanks co-wrote and narrates, the movie re-creates what it's like to travel to the moon, bound around on the surface and head back home. Conventional movies have given viewers a sense of this before. The IMAX production, Hanks hopes, will swallow them up whole. "The moon landings affected us emotionally, intellectually, spiritually," he says. "I want to make that experience as visceral for people as possible."

What is it about the pull of the moon that holds Hanks fast? Why does a high-powered Hollywood player with the muscle to tackle pretty much any production he wants keep returning to his lunar love?

In the cavernous conference room of the IMAX headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., Hanks doesn't look like a man consumed by the moon. He looks like a man getting over a cold--coughing, sipping hot tea and racing to get through the last few weeks of postproduction before heading to Europe to begin shooting his next superproject, The Da Vinci Code.

Hanks has good reason to feel worn out. To re-create a flight to the moon, Playtone and IMAX filled a Los Angeles soundstage with Styrofoam, concrete and pulverized roofing tiles--the simulated lunar surface--and borrowed exact replicas of a lunar module and lunar rover from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. They stitched together spacesuits from the boots up, rolled in a 240-lb. 3-D IMAX camera, in addition to the cameras director of photography Sean Phillips built himself, and rigged the entire set with a harness system to simulate the one-sixth-gravity bunny hop the astronauts would use to bound across the moonscape.

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.

The only historical liberties Hanks and Cowen took in their 40-min. moon ride were small ones. The curators of the lunar vehicles wanted to keep the machines free of dust, so the interior of the module stays clean--far different from the gunpowder-scented, soil-covered surfaces the astronauts describe. Hanks also had the actor astronauts lift their gold-colored visors more often than their real-life counterparts did, revealing the clear faceplates--and faces--underneath. "We wanted to remind audiences that those were human beings up there," he says.

Hanks can't say if he has still more space yarns in him after this. He may try science fiction--a historically high-stakes genre in which filmmakers either succeed brilliantly or flame out spectacularly. But in an era of shrunken space programs peddling small-bore dreams, there's something to be said for keeping the torch burning.

"I'll probably be 136 the day we finally land on Mars," Hanks says. "They'll wheel me out and say, 'Remember that actor? We thought he'd like to see this.'" If so, they might also offer him a small word of thanks.