The trailers for Fly Me to the Moon grabbed my attention. Having watched the famous Apollo 11 landing on live television back in 1969, the event has special significance, even more so after conspiracy theories began to emerge over the years that followed.
The notion that such a colossal achievement could have been staged seemed utterly preposterous initially, but the nay-sayers argued that we simply lacked the technology in 1969 to actually pull it off.
It was suggested that NASA struggled to make good on JFK’s famous prediction in the early Sixties-- that the United States, “should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth”.
Some catastrophic failures following that speech in 1961 included the tragic death of the Apollo 1 crew who perished on the launch pad in a fiery inferno. Serious questions arose about the true capabilities of the NASA engineers.
Interestingly, Fly Me to the Moon begins with a montage that recounts the Sixties, the space program, the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. The decade of the Sixties was also known as the Golden Age of Advertising when some of the most famous ads of all time were created.
Scarlett Johansson’s character Kelly Jones is a superstar, Madison Avenue, creative genius in the movie who comes to the attention of a mysterious government agent, Moe Berkus, played by Woody Harrelson. Moe recruits Kelly to bolster the public image of NASA, an agency losing attention and funding due to the escalating war in Southeast Asia.
Kelly immediately shakes up the space agency and recalibrates its operations by suggesting lucrative corporate sponsorships from the makers of Omega watches and Tang. All of this infuriates the top guy at NASA, Cole Davis, played by Channing Tatum. He’s a by-the-books former fighter pilot who has eyes for Kelly but wants no part of her shameless marketing schemes. With movie scripts like this, we know how all this will eventually work out. Opposites attract. No surprises here.
The surprise development comes when Moe Berkus pulls Kelly aside and tells her that she has to mastermind one of the greatest scams in history—to create a plausible staging of the moon landing that will be broadcast worldwide, in the event that the real landing would fail. He explains that there is simply too much at stake. In the age of Cold War politics, it’s a compelling argument.
And so, Kelly sets about on a top-secret mission using a large, vacant soundstage of a building right on the launch site, involving a detailed lunar landscape, lunar lander mockup, and space-suited astronauts, all under the direction of Kelly’s flamboyant, stereotypic New York commercial director, Lance Verpertine (played hilariously by Jim Rash).
There is a passing reference to Stanley Kubrick whose name has been tossed around by conspiracy theorists for years now, maintaining that Kubrick was either approached to stage the moon landing video or that he actually did it—a secret that he apparently took to his grave, if you believe it’s true.
Fly Me to the Moon offers a clever twist to the persistent rumors about what actually happened regarding the possible staging of the moon landing. No spoilers here. It would be giving away too much.
While it makes for some speculative fun, the movie runs a little too long. The screenplay and/or editing could have been tightened up a bit, maybe even by a half hour. Story-wise, it’s a movie that just doesn’t know when to quit, including the ending that unnecessarily drags on even after we’ve seen how it all plays out.
Maybe the best thing about Fly Me to the Moon is the fact that it takes us back to one of the pivotal moments of the 20th Century. Actually, it’s one of mankind’s crowning moments when you consider its significance in terms of science, technology, sheer determination and raw courage.
It seems unthinkable that this moment could slip into the murkiness of fading history, though one has to take into consideration the undeniable fact that, despite our more advanced space technology, we Earthlings have not landed on the moon since December of 1972.
For all the conspiracy theorists, it only adds weight to their claim that we never went there in the first place.
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