Fly Me to the Moon: Review and Story of the Film with Scarlett Johansson

Kelly Jones of Scarlett Johanssona marketing expert who uses everything from a fake belly to a fake Southern chatter to close a deal, can sell anything. Or at least, that’s what the Nixon administration is banking on in the new film Fly Me to the Moon, which tells the story of the race to conquer space through the use of zany comedy. Kelly is recruited by Nixon administration agent Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), to promote the Apollo 11 space mission led by NASA launch director Cole Davis, played by Channing Tatum.

“I’m not turning this ship into a flying billboard,” says Tatum’s Cole, a character inspired by the real-life Air Force pilot turned NASA employee. Deke Slayton. But he lives in an era long before billionaire-funded space travel, when all cosmic exploration required government support. For that reason, NASA must convince the American public – and skeptical politicians, one of whom is played in the film by Colin JostJohansson’s real-life husband – on the usefulness of space travel.

This part of the film is very true to life. “I absolutely believe that the marketing aspect of Apollo was as important as the spacecraft itself,” said marketing strategist and author David Meerman Scott to the New York Times in 2019. Even some of Kelly’s bizarre tactics are based in fact: companies like Kellogg’s And Omega they actually partnered with NASA for some sponsorship opportunities. Other story lines, like him hiring charismatic actors to pose as NASA engineers for video interviews, probably never happened. They do not exist not even evidence that Neil Armstrong was coached on what to say when he first stepped onto the moon, even though Kelly admits in the film that “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” is the best line he could have ever said.

Another decisive element in gaining consensus was the decision to attack a camera outside Apollo 11, bringing the launch to the widest possible audience. According to astronomy, NASA’s communications team had to push for the imagery because “some engineers were concerned that developing that equipment would take away from the lunar landing effort.” But marketing and filming the manned journey to the moon “were absolutely essential to making that happen,” Scott said.

This is where things get complicated. In Fly Me to the Moon, administration Nixon is anxious about the Apollo 11 mission and comes up with a backup plan in case of failure. It’s called Project Artemis (which was the original title of the film when Chris Evans he had been cast as the lead and Jason Bateman as director) and involves staging a fake moon landing that will be broadcast on TV if the real mission fails. “This isn’t a space race, this is a battle to determine what ideology will govern this country,” Moe tells Kelly. She reluctantly agrees to the ruse and enlists director Lance Vespertine (Jim Rash), whom she calls “the Kubrick of advertising”, for the assignment of her life.

This is an obvious allusion to the largely debunked but still somewhat popular conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick staged the moon landing. This theory, which was explained in a 2022 short film and a 2012 documentary Room 237, it goes more or less like this:

A year after hiring aeronautics specialists and aerospace engineers to design the interiors of spaceships for his 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick was recruited to film a fake Apollo 11 moon landing. Much of the so-called evidence supporting this theory is “found” in the director’s The Shining, which some have interpreted as his confession to having faked the moon landing. Conspiracy theorists point to the “evidence” as the “Apollo” sweater that Danny Torrance is wearing and the key to “Room 237” at the Overlook Hotel, whose letters can be rearranged to spell out “Moon Room.” Kubrick’s daughter, Vivianhas publicly denied the theory, calling it “a patently grotesque lie.”

Moon landing conspiracy theories have existed for decades. In 1976, Bill Kaysing, one of the first prominent Moon landing deniers, published a book titled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. According to a 1976 Gallup poll, nearly 28% of Americans agreed with his ideas at the time. In 1978 he was released Capricorn One, a fictional film in which a journalist (Elliot Gould) uncovers a government hoax about the Mars landing (OJ Simpson is one of the astronauts). In 2002, the then 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the Moon, has unleashed a fist in the face of the conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel who, outside a Beverly Hill hotel, called him a “coward,” a “liar,” and a “thief.” Sibrel later tried to sue Aldrin for assault, but the court dismissed the case.

In light of this history of dangerous misinformation, Greg Berlanti, who directs Fly Me to the Moon from a screenplay by Rose Gilroy (among the authors there are also Keenan Flynn And Bill Kirstein), wanted to play responsibly with the idea of ​​recreating the moon landing. “I’m not sure I would have said yes if I hadn’t known that NASA was as passionate about this story as I was,” he told Deadline. “It’s impossible, these days, to tell a story about one of the most popular conspiracy theories without being aware that we live in a hyper-politicized age. As much as it celebrates NASA and sincerely honors its achievements, the film has something to say about why the truth matters, and it does so in a fun way.”

In the work, the fake version of the moon landing is filmed without NASA’s knowledge, which may explain the organization’s approval. Some scenes were even filmed on location, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Spoiler alert: in the movie, the moon landing actually happens, making the use of reconstruction useless. Moe then orders all documents related to the falsified version to be destroyed. “Your name will be erased from the history books,” he says, “history will be rewritten.”

In fact, there is no solid reason to believe that such a cover-up ever occurred. As the film points out, more than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo 11 mission for more than a decade. The scale of the project indicates how unlikely (and difficult) it would have been to fake the mission’s true outcome. “If the primary motivation for believing the moon hoax is that you don’t trust your government, you don’t trust your leaders, you don’t trust authority, how can you expect 400,000 people to keep their mouths shut for 50 years?” the astronomer asked in 2019 Rick Feinberg, then press officer of the American Astronomical Society, History. “It’s simply unbelievable.”