BEFORE: Back on space travel, this is the third film on that topic this month, if you count "Dune: Part Two". I don't exactly remember if they SAY that the humans seen in "Dune" started out on Earth and then made their way out to other planets, perhaps it's implied, or maybe they just never brought it up...I think in that franchise nobody ever goes back to Earth because it's so polluted, humans just used up all the resources and then got out of there. Anyway, that's the distant future, and tonights film is set in the past, leading up to the Apollo 11 mission.
I'm one day early, but January 27 marks the date of the Apollo 1 mission disaster, the one in which 3 astronauts (Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee) died at the Kennedy Space Center in a fire that occurred during a mission test in 1967. Not a fun anniversary to celebrate, and nobody really marks the 58th anniversary of anything, but it ALMOST lines up with my programming, so yeah, I'm going to mention it. I can't delay my movie by 24 hours, and I don't want to go looking for another film to fit in here, I've got too many films scheduled for January as it is.
Colin Woodell carries over from "Ambulance".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Moonwalkers" (Movie #2,895)
THE PLOT: Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on NASA launch director Cole Davis's already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, the countdown truly begins.
AFTER: Generally good feelings from this one, but I just wish they hadn't focused so much on the possibility that NASA might have faked the moon landing. I've already seen one film that used this as its plot, and now there's a second. What good does this do? That's all based on rumor, it's been proven time and time again that the U.S. really landed on the moon, to bring up this silly story again at this point just re-opens that possibility that the stupid conspiracy nuts might be right, and they're not. Was the real Apollo 11 men-landing-on-the-moon thing not exciting enough? If you can't tell the story the right way without resorting to the conspiracy theories, maybe you're just not telling the story right. "Hidden Figures" seemed to do OK, so did "Apollo 13" and "First Man", just by telling the story the way it was - anything with astronauts and traveling to outer space is inherently exciting, we don't have to throw in studio sets and pirate transmission feeds and maybe even aliens, just tell the true story better!
I'm taking a point off for this - this could have been a solid "7" but they tried to have it both ways here, somehow, according to this film, we DID have astronauts landing on the moon, but we ALSO had people standing by in a studio, ready to fake the footage if something went wrong with the transmission from the moon, or - God forbid - those astronauts missed the moon entirely. Apparently it was THAT important that the U.S. prove they got their first, that we beat the Russians in the space race so they'd give up, that we were ready to fake it if we didn't make it. BUZZ! Wrong answer, maybe try again.
Plus, it's a bit NITPICK POINT here that IF NASA did try to fake the moon landing, and I'm not saying they did, because they didn't, but IF they did, they would have just hired Kubrick to film fake footage IN ADVANCE, and then just run that footage on TV instead of what they didn't get from the moon. Filming the FAKE moon landing LIVE doesn't make any sense, because here they were syncing up the actors' movement on the moon set with the verbal transmissions from Apollo 11. There are several reasons why this wouldn't have worked, one is the time delay when you send sound or picture from such a great distance - it's under a second and a half, but it's there. So even with a live transmission, you'd always be looking at what happened over a second ago, so I'm guessing the live footage would be right there, and so it's not out of sync enough, it would be too perfect. Plus, what was the plan if Apollo 11 missed the moon entirely and the astronauts sailed off into space? Then NASA would run the fake footage and never get around to explaining why the astronauts didn't come back? Or if they did come back, why didn't they bring any moon rocks with them?
Look, they had Apollo 8, which took men around the moon, they just didn't land on it. So NASA had nailed everything up to that point except the landing part, and perhaps more importantly, getting those astronauts OFF the moon again and back to Earth. Sure, anybody can GET there, but getting back alive, that's the tricky part. And if you fake the moon landing, then you also have to fake the return and recovery of the capsule, and then, jeez, where does it end? Isn't the simpler answer that they got there, they landed, they got moon rocks, they left footprints and a flag, and some other garbage behind? Great job, guys, now we've polluted TWO objects in the solar system, not just one.
Another NITPICK POINT is that the video camera was NOT a new innovation for Apollo 11, they used the same Westinghouse camera on the Apollo 10 mission, only the camera was kept inside the capsule. So there already WAS video footage of the moon, from the previous mission - so less need to create fake video footage. For Apollo 11, the camera was attached to the exterior of the lunar landing module, that's why the footage of Armstrong descending the ladder exists in the first place and why your conspiracy nut friends can't ask the question, "OK, so who was outside on the surface, taking the footage of the astronauts, then?" Nobody, it was remotely controlled and activated from inside the LEM before they stepped out.
I liked the rest of the movie, it had comedy, romance, action, everything you need, it made fun of NASA engineers for being total nerds AND dweebs, which they probably were, and they also made Channing Tatum stand out from that pack, I'm guessing most NASA launch engineers don't look like Channing Tatum, but then hey, what do I know? They probably did look more like Ed Harris in "Apollo 13", right? And I can't say I'm an expert on the marketing of the Apollo missions, how Tang and Omega watch companies got involved, but sure, I can guess that maybe there were marketing and advertising people who handled some or all of that. Ten years into the space program, yeah, maybe the budgets were getting cut and maybe there were some senators who thought sending people to the moon was a big waste of money.
But, really, what are the odds that the straight-laced launch director and the smooth-talking female marketing person are going to clash at first and then, somehow, through working together, develop a romantic attraction to each other? Well, it's a Hollywood movie so those odds are probably close to 100%, because that's how movies work. It's all fluff and distraction, however, because the really exciting story would be to follow those astronauts, not the NASA people on the ground trying to figure out if they're showing the right footage or not. It's fun and entertaining fluff and distraction, but it's still fluff and distraction. I think showing how they had to pitch the importance of the moon landing to senators, and also sell it to the American public at large is an interesting part of the story that we don't usually see, but it's not the MAIN part of the story to me. This would be a bit like making a movie about the performance of the play "My American Cousin" and not focusing on the Lincoln assassination that took place during it.
But guys, we've got to get past the fake moon landing controversy at some point, and this just isn't helping. People are dumb, and consider the power you have, Facebook is no longer fact-checking posts, and Twitter/X really never was. So you can throw stories out into the zeitgeist now that have no truth at all, and people will be inclined to believe them. We're getting stupider as a species, instead of smarter, and now that we have A.I. generated videos, it's only going to get worse. They can make a fake photo or video of Trump posing with African-American fans, and that has influence, suddenly it looks like he's got much more support from the black community than he really does, and that has consequences. Er, HAD. 7% of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows! 5% already think the moon landing was fake, and 4% believe that the world is flat, not round. Now I wonder if those are the same people, if the 4% is part of the 5%, or are those different groups of stupid people?
Look, I've never been to Cape Canaveral, but I've been to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. I go places, I do my research, and if there's a historical thing to visit while my wife and I are on one of our famous BBQ crawls, then we do it. I've been to the fake Parthenon in Nashville, I've been on the sixth floor of the former Texas Schoolbook depository in Dallas, and I've been to the Alamo, among other places. (I learn about these things, and you know, after we went to the Alamo I ended up correcting a tour guide in Houston, who casually mentioned that everyone who was at the Alamo died, which, umm, is just not true. The Mexican army sent a few women and children to carry news of the massacre to General Sam Houston. Google it.). So I've seen the rockets at the Space Center in Houston - well, OK, not the Saturn V rocket they have there, because it was either look at that rocket or check out the cafeteria, and we were hungry. I stand by that decision. Unfortunately, we were there in October of 2018, which was a little over 49 years since the moon landing, and they showed us the famous control room, but it was in the midst of being restored for the upcoming 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Oh well, you can't win 'em all, we still saw a bunch of moon rocks and space shuttles and the craft that may take people to Mars in a few years, unless of course they FAKE THAT TOO. Jeezus.
The real crime was that there were no space-themed items in the Space Center cafeteria. You want me to come all the way to Texas and order just regular food, like a chicken sandwich and some fries? I want space food, not like Tang and food in little pouches, come on, get creative, jazz things up a bit! Serve moon pies or moon pizzas or I don't know, maybe crescent rolls because the moon is sometimes a crescent, do I have to think of everything for you? Space burgers or space dogs, I don't know, there used to be a theme restaurant in Manhattan called Mars 2112, and they had a whole outer-space themed menu!. We also went to the Star Trek Experience years ago at the Vegas Hilto, and they had a replica of Quark's Bar from Deep Space Nine. They were serving Romulan ale, ham-Borg-ers, the Wrap of Khan and a whole lot of other stuff named after the show's characters. Why couldn't the cafeteria at the Johnson space center be more like that?
Also starring Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Woody Harrelson (last heard in "Free Birds"), Ray Romano (last seen in "Somewhere in Queens"), Jim Rash (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Noah Robbins (last heard in "Leo"), Christian Clemenson (last seen in "Live by Night"), Nick Dillenburg, Christian Zuber, Gene Jones (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "The Ring"), Stephanie Kurtzuba (last seen in "The Machine"), Colin Jost (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Dariusz Wolski, Njema Williams (last seen in "Masterminds"), Peter Jacobson (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Lauren Revard (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Greg Kriek (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Bill Barrett (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Gary Weeks (last seen in "Allegiant"), Todd Allen Durkin, Chris Vroman, Christian Grey Moore, Kade Pittman, Trevor Morgan, Todd James Jackson, Peter Wallack, Jeremy Carr, Eugene Alper, Aidan Patrick Griffin, Alan Boell (last seen in "Creed III"), Robert McLeroy, Daniel Norris, Rory Keane (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Joseph Britt, Frank Hughes, J. Michael Popovich, Mark Armstrong (last seen in "First Man"), Gerry Griffin, Victor Garber (last heard in "Wish"), Art Newkirk (also last seen in "Jackpot!"), with archive footage of Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Sid & Judy").
RATING: 6 out of 10 Secret Service agents (also in the wrong place - this just isn't what they do)
