This week Sony Entertainment and Apple TV+ released the official trailer for Fly Me to the Moon, a new romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum and Woody Harrelson.
As it is customary nowadays with trailers that feel the need to explain the whole plot of the movie in under 3 minutes, Fly Me to the Moon not only exploits the huge impact modern advertising had in cultivating the public support of the American space program, with Johansson being a sort of “Man Men” (or in this case, “Mad Women”) type of marketing genius in charge of “selling the Moon” to the American people. But the movie will also deal with one of the grand-daddies of conspiracy theories: the faking of the lunar landings.
(Tin foil hatters will surely chuckle with the Kubrick gag at the end)
Lunar landing conspiracies have been used by Hollywood several times. There is for example Chris Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) showing how in the indeterminate future year the movie takes place, school textbooks are now teaching the Apollo lunar program was a propaganda campaign employed by the government for the purpose of bankrupting the Soviet Union.
And who could forget Buzz Aldrin’s brief cameo in Transformers 3 (2011) explaining to the Autobots how NASA had forced astronauts to lie about what they had really found on the Moon?
But the first movie that spotlighted lunar conspiracies was 1977’s Capricorn One, although instead of showing a (fake) lunar landing, the movie deals with the first mission to Mars gone awry, which seals the fate of the astronauts who were part of the hoax. Despite the over-the-top action scenes and stiff acting performances, the impact this movie had in cementing the popularity of this conspiracy theory should not be underestimated.
Incidentally, this brings about an example of what researchers like Loren Coleman call “synchromysticism” since the death of one of the stars of Capricorn One —the infamous O.J. Simpson— was announced on the same week Sony’s Fly Me to the Moon was released. Strange coincidence, innit?
Fly Me to the Moon opens on theaters this July. It will be interesting to see whether the film manages to reignite the flames of this old conspiracy —maybe they will even have Woody Harrelson making a JFK assassination joke.
BTW, when is Hollywood planning to make a movie about the Flat Earth?
