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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Great research tool, 5 Jul 2004
There are two parts to this DVD set. The first is a documentary overview of Project Gemini. It is very informative, though suffers slightly from a niggle that seems to be common to a lot of American documentaries: the narrator hardly seems to pause for breath! With the amount of footage present it would be easy to make the documentary longer to allow the narrator to shut up now and again and let the images do the talking. Instead it is either narration or short soundbites from the Gemini missions and press conferences. Still, this is a minor niggle, and overall the project is covered very succinctly.The second, and major, part of the DVD set is the actual footage of the Gemini missions themselves. With the exception of launch footage the film is mostly silent, and is overlaid by occasional snatches from the mission communications or (more often) from the post-flight press conferences. This ranges from dry factual relating of the events to some highly entertaining banter between the astronauts (the Gemini VI and VII rendezvous narration, especially that by Jim Lovell, being very amusing in places). The footage is for the most part not especially dramatic, and in some places is difficult to watch, but it is great to have it all condensed into one place and be able to watch it all. Again, there is one minor niggle here, and that is that occasionally the footage passes in complete silence, presumably because there was no suitable original audio to cover the events depicted. At these points it would have been nice, I feel, to have had some new narration or a few captions to explain what is being seen on the screen (for instance which coastline is passing beneath them in some lengthy sequences). This DVD set is not six hours of dramatic footage, or six hours of highly informative, nicely structured documentary, so it is not good for someone with a slight interest in spaceflight. It is six hours of historic original space footage that documents the Gemini missions in a highly comprehensive fashion and serves as an excellent research tool for anyone with more than a passing interest in the space programs of the era.
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