The Dish (2000 - Australia)

Stars: Sam Neill, Patrick Warburton, etc.

Directed by Rob Sitch

In 1969, the famous Apollo 11 lunar landing was telecast not through signals received from American satellite systems and antennas...but through a huge satellite dish in the middle of a sheep paddock in Parkes, New South Wales. Based on a true story, we see the crew of the observatory and the community around it prepare for the history that haplessly changed their lives...the Australian way!

While it gives us plenty of scenes and sounds from footage of plenty of NASA historical archives, the movie was quite funny viewed in the eyes of the residents of the little town Down Under. From political inanities of gaining 'popular attention' by the mayor and the Prime Minister, invitations by the American ambassador (in which the stage band played the American national anthem with the Hawaii Five-O theme! LOL), a sudden town blackout that lost the connecting signal to Apollo 11 (where they really have to 'compromise' the ambassador's visit in the observatory with 'fake' communications done under the basement...and the security guard confusingly getting the 'fake' signal from his band radio and tries to call Neil Armstrong), to just about the scientific explanations to almost any of the people around the community (say "Earth is like a basketball with two valves" and "carries the signal through carrier pigeons").

Very lighthearted movie. The humor has given us the entertainment we need (well the blackouts really didn't happen, they say) to enjoy the movie yet somehow gives us back the fascination of human history that I have never seen nor were born at that time...and I hope we can rejuvenate the same objective that united the world in July of 1969.