by: M. Faust

Taking conspiracy theories seriously and ignoring climate change doesn’t make a movie better

Besides entertainment, do the movies owe us anything? Such as, oh, I don’t know, maybe, for instance … truth?

Obviously, facts have never been a big consideration in Hollywood. I’d be hard pressed to name a biopic that didn’t take enormous liberties with whoever’s life it was purporting to portray. And as for historical events, filmmakers have long held that the details of what actually happened are less important than the general perception they want viewers to take away from the movie. Some will argue that a movie is only an introduction to a topic that will inspire viewers to investigate the story more fully. (Whether any filmmaker has ever said this with a straight face, I couldn’t say: it certainly bespeaks a generous view of the intellectual curiosity of most moviegoers.)

Still, at a time when it is getting harder and harder for people to agree on any given set of historical data, as those with bad intentions are discovering how easy it is to use modern communications to create new sets of “facts” that benefit them, is it asking too much that the movies not contribute to the problem?

It was one thing in 2009 for Quentin Tarantino to end Inglourious Basterds by depicting most of the Nazi hierarchy, including Adolph Hitler, being massacred by American Jewish commandos in a Paris theater. The scene is effective exactly because we all know that it didn’t happen that way (wouldn’t it have been nice if it had?). And even if some undereducated viewer of the future comes across the movie and takes it as being 100% historically accurate, little harm is done as it doesn’t change the real story in any important way.

The new comedy Fly Me To the Moon crosses the line. It takes a stubbornly persistent “conspiracy theory” — that the footage of American astronauts walking on the moon, seen live on millions of television sets in July 1969, was faked — and teases the audience with the possibility that the United States government did try to do so.

Woody Harrelson (who better for this kind of part?) plays Moe Berkus, a shadowy government agent who hires Manhattan advertising whiz Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) to boost PR for NASA. It is the beginning of 1969, and the American public has lost its initial enthusiasm for the costly space race. Even though a mission to land men on the moon has been scheduled for the summer, some members of Congress are threatening to cut off funding. Whoever Berkus represents (this is left intentionally vague) fears that this would be a disastrous victory for the Soviet Union.

So Jones goes to work, arranging for product placement and favorable news stories, all to the consternation of square-jawed launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum). So successful is she that Berkus gives her another assignment: set up an exact facsimile of the moon’s surface and the NASA landing craft so that, in case something goes wrong with the mission’s cameras, the public will still be given something to watch on TV.

None of this actually happened, but it plays plausibly enough. (More so than the warming relationship between Johansson and Tatum, one of those movie romances that is motivated solely by the fact that the pair are good-looking and top-billed.)

That plausibility made me uneasy. Even if (spoiler alert) the bogus footage is not actually broadcast, it is only because Berkus’s plan is foiled. The government is shown as ready and willing to perpetuate a fraud. And it is a fraud that millions of people already believe happened.

According to a 2021 University of New Hampshire poll done by a research team investigating conspiracy theories, only 71% of those queried believed that NASA had actually landed men on the moon; 12% believed it was faked and 17% were unsure. And people who believe one conspiracy are generally eager to believe ones that are even more preposterous and malign (I trust I do not have to give examples). The filmmakers seem to feel that audiences will recognize that Fly Me To the Moon was made with a wink and a nudge but I’m not so sure.

In the case of the disaster reboot Twisters, the untruth is one of omission: in a movie about tornadoes that are more frequent and severe than the world has seen in the past, the phrase “climate change” is never uttered. It was, in fact, purposely avoided. Director Lee Isaac Chung told an interviewer on CNN that he didn’t want to make a film that was “message-oriented.”

It’s true that scientists are uncertain what, if any, role climate change plays in the increasing severity of tornadoes, but in a two hour movie about people who devote their lives to chasing tornadoes, it is impossible to believe that the subject would never come up. In a movie that features a non-stop soundtrack of country music, choosing to omit that discussion is a more political decision than including it.

Is the movie as good as the original Twister? Nope. The special effects are better, but they’re also less effective. Chung and his FX teams largely chose not to use the iconic (to anyone who grew up on The Wizard of Oz) images of mile-high spinning storms that the 1996 movie used so effectively. And Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell (whose perpetual smirk is the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard) are poor substitutes for Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

M. Faust is a veteran film critic and a contributor to The Buffalo Hive.