The moon landing was a giant leap for movies, too

July 19, 2019 GMT
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This July 17, 1969 photo made available by NASA shows the Earth as the Apollo 11 mission travels towards the moon. It’s estimated that about 600 million people around the world watched as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969. (NASA via AP)
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Space exploration was then an exciting possibility, but one far from realization. That July, the NASA’s Ranger 7 sent back high-resolution photographs from the moon’s surface. Kubrick and Clarke, convinced the moon was only the start, began to toil on a script together. It would be five years before astronauts landed on the moon, on July 20, 1969. Kubrick took flight sooner. “2001: A Space Odyssey” opened in theaters April 3, 1968.








“How could you argue with Buzz Aldrin’s landing shot with a 16mm camera using variable frame rate and shutter exposures out the lunar module window?” marvels Miller. “I mean, come up with a better shot in cinema history than the landing on the moon. And likewise, Michael Collins in the command module seeing the lunar module come off the surface of the moon. They’re incredible shots on their own and they’re also technically astute.”



Science fiction runs on its own parallel timeline. It resides beyond contemporary reality while at the same time being informed by it. It’s built on future dreams past. Lucas was inspired by the 1936 serial “Flash Gordon.” Spielberg, who later made Kubrick’s “A.I.,” referred to “2001,” not the moon landing, as the genre’s “big bang.”


″‘The Right Stuff’ is right from the beginning a continuation of the Western,” Kaufman says. “The hero of ‘The Right Stuff’ is a spirit. It’s called the Right Stuff and it’s something that’s ineffable. It’s the ultimate modesty in a way. It’s in the great laconic characters of the Western. You don’t brag. You do your task in the best way possible. And maybe, as in ‘The Searchers’ or ‘Shane,’ you walk away at the end.”


“How do we refresh that sense of adventure?” he wonders, citing the touristy lines on Mount Everest. “How do we memorialize the landing on the moon not just with parades and self-congratulation but a sense of reverence for the greatness of the people who did it?”

Ever since the moon landing made fantasy real, a strain of science-fiction has ridden scientific accuracy for big-screen spectacle. Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” (2015) and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014) took physics-based approaches to tell reasonably plausible tales of space travel, with scientists as consultants. NASA helped extensively on Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning “Apollo 13” (1995). Weightless scenes were filmed 25 seconds at a time on NASA’s KC-135 plane, in momentary zero gravity.

Margaret Weitekamp, curator of space and science-fiction history at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, sees a reciprocal relationship between filmmakers and scientists, with ideas flowing between the two — often to the benefit of NASA.

“When you see films in the post-Apollo era that really capture the spirit and triumph and the glory of human space flight, like ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Apollo 13,’ you see a direct increase in approval ratings for NASA and human space flight,” Weitekamp said. “After ‘The Martian,’ NASA had one of the largest recruiting application pools that they’ve ever had for the astronaut program.”

Other filmmakers saw something different, and lonelier on the moon and the potentially lifeless reaches of space. Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who found “2001” too sterile, sought to make a more human space drama in “Solaris” (1972). The space station was shabbier, the emotions more earthbound. The French filmmaker Claire Denis, in this year’s “High Life” with Robert Pattinson, similarly went to space only to wrestle with many of things she always has: sex, violence, parenthood.

“A lot of science fiction films are about conquest,” Denis says. “In that void, that huge universe, there’s not many things to fight, unless you do ‘Star Wars’ and there’s an alien living there.”


“I remember very clearly when we first saw a picture of our Earth, Stanley was immediately disappointed and depressed that he hadn’t gotten the model of the Earth in ’2001′ the right color,” Katharina recalls. “In the film, it’s very pale blue and misty and cloudy. But we hadn’t really seen it yet. We didn’t know how clearly we’d be able to see it. He just said, ‘Oh gee, I should have made it bluer.’”



