The new Scarlett Johansson-Channing Tatum vehicle, “Fly Me to the Moon,” uses a long-debunked conspiracy theory as the jumping-off point for a space-race romantic comedy. At the end of the 1960s, a wary NASA recognizes the need for better public relations during the Vietnam War. The resulting campaign leads to a faked version of the Apollo 11 mission being shot on a sound stage even as the real mission is unfolding. Shenanigans, and romance, ensue.
“Fly Me to the Moon” isn’t the first movie based on the mistaken belief that the moon landing was a hoax, a conspiracy theory that first arose in the 1970s. “Capricorn One” (1978), about a faked mission to Mars, taps into Watergate-era institutional distrust, and more recently, “Moonwalkers” (2015) pairs a CIA agent with a rock band manager to fake the Apollo 11 landing.
What sets “Fly Me to the Moon” apart is its insistence on the truth. The movie’s writers say they hope it will reinforce the real story of the moon landing. But is that possible in a post-COVID-19 age when conspiracy theories are amplified on social media?
The screenplay, written by Rose Gilroy and based on a story by Keenan Flynn and Bill Kirstein, plays with the theory, including a joke on some conspiracists’ belief that director Stanley Kubrick supposedly had a hand in faking the historic event. (He did not.) But, ultimately, the film emphasizes that the Apollo 11 landing did take place.
Flynn said the initial idea for the movie came in 2016. As the nation wrangled with questions about truth during a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump frequently castigated the “lying” media, the moon landing made for a perfect setting.
“That was the assignment,” Flynn said. “How do you have your cake and eat it, too? You have fun with the fake moon landing, but you really bring home that truth matters by highlighting that achievement.”
Gilroy said that she had read some books to better understand the conspiracy but that there was simply nothing to them.
“We wanted to build a story around the idea of these people coming together to ensure that the mission is real,” she said. “Not in any of my research did I ever come across one iota of a fact that made me question in any way the validity of this accomplishment.”
Adam Frank, an astronomer and physicist at the University of Rochester whose work focuses on science denial, said pop culture had a responsibility to fight a nihilistic tendency to doubt science and human potential.
“It’s lazy writing to say ‘The government was in on the conspiracy’ as opposed to ‘People actually all worked together and they found the answer,’” Frank said. “They worked for 20 years and sent a probe to Mars and it did exactly what they said they were going to do. Somehow, that is less exciting than ‘It didn’t work and they had a conspiracy.’”
“Fly Me to the Moon” does focus on the laborious team effort that went into the landing. But now that it’s easier than ever to take an image out of context and spread it online, good intentions can be lost. Fretting about the film may also be quaint at this point: Images generated by artificial intelligence showing a faked-moon-landing film set went viral earlier this year.
Lawrence Hamilton, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire who studies anti-science conspiracy belief, pointed to an image used by moon-landing deniers as a cautionary tale. The photo, showing astronauts without their helmets during a training exercise at the Kennedy Space Center, has been shared repeatedly on social media over the years.
“They said, ‘This is them faking the moon landing, and it’s proof,’” he recalled. “And they will do the same thing with clips from this movie. They’ll do whatever it takes to say, ‘This proves what we’ve said all along.’”
For people who don’t have strong memories of watching the moon landing, that influence can be strong. In a 2021 national survey, Hamilton found that only 12% of respondents believed that the moon landings were faked, but that millennials were more likely than other generations to deny it happened.
Generation Zers were more likely to be unsure if it happened. A recent TikTok filter asking users to rank things on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how much they believe in them, with 1 being more likely and 10 being less likely, inspired multiple videos with people placing the moon landing below things such as God, magic and ghosts. But a few popular videos doesn’t mean Gen Zers are flocking to moon-landing conspiracies en masse, as the survey shows.
One person who isn’t worried about the movie unintentionally bolstering conspiracy beliefs is actor Anna Garcia, who plays Ruby, an assistant to Johansson’s character.
“I think if someone’s really dumb, they’ll definitely get that message,” Garcia told Variety at the movie’s premiere. “I think if someone is sort of dumb as rocks, they’ll be like, ‘It was fake.’” — NYT
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