NASA’s launched the rocket Artemis II today, the first manned mission to the moon in over 50 years. The 10-day mission will see three American astronauts and one Canadian travel around the moon and back, although they will not land on the moon itself.
The Artemis II aims to travel 250,000 miles into outer space in an attempt to break the record of 248,655 miles made by Apollo 13 in 1970. Artemis II’s mission hopes to pave the way for further space exploration and manned missions to Mars.
All this moon chatter got us thinking about how Hollywood has chronicled humankind’s relationship with our closest celestial neighbor.
We’ve settled on these 12 projects – 11 movies and one miniseries – you might want to add to your queue if you’re still over the moon about Artemis II, starting with:
First Man
Before he went into space to save the world in Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling portrayed astronaut Neil Armonstrong in director Damien Chazelle’s 2018 film, First Man.
In IGN’s First Man review, critic Rafael Motamayor hailed the film as “a stunning cinematic achievement that celebrates one of humanity’s biggest triumphs (and mourns the tragedies that happened leading up to it), yet it never loses sight of its personal and small-scale story about a man going to work.”
“When we finally get to the moon landing the screen expands, changing from 35mm to 70mm IMAX. It is a breathtaking shot, aided by the format, that really puts the viewer in the shoes of Neil Armstrong as he makes his iconic first steps. The sound is completely cut off, and most of the screen goes pitch black to immerse the audience and make them feel like they are in the void of space. First Man acknowledges how magnificent an achievement the moon landing was, yet it never loses sight of the inner struggle and journey of the first man who stepped on its surface.”
Two From Tom Hanks: Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon
Tom Hanks’ other well known passion beyond World War II is the Space Race of the 1950s and ‘60s where the United States sought to reach the Moon before the Soviets. In 1998, Hanks exec produced the HBO twelve-part docudrama miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, which chronicled NASA’s Apollo program of the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Hanks directed the first episode – covering NASA’s creation and the early Mercury and Gemini programs – and hosted the first 11 episodes. In the show’s twelfth and final episode, Hanks portrays the assistant to Georges Méliès, the director of the 1902 sci-fi film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune).
Hanks has revisited the troubled Apollo 13 mission twice in his career, first in 1995’s Apollo 13 and then again in From the Earth to the Moon. Director Ron Howard’s dramatization recreates the suspenseful 1970 lunar mission in which astronauts Jim Lovell (Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) became trapped in space after their craft’s oxygen tanks exploded, crippling their power and air supply. Howard’s film painstakingly recreates how the astronauts and the NASA ground crew (supervised by Ed Harris) worked feverishly to return Apollo 13 safely to Earth.
While most filmgoers knew the story’s outcome beforehand, the fun and suspense of Apollo 13 is in watching how brilliant men use their wits and all available resources to get the job done. Top-notch performances by the entire cast, a taut screenplay, and assured direction make Apollo 13 a great piece of entertainment and a stirring tribute to the American “can-do” spirit. From the Earth to the Moon’s depiction of the Apollo 13 mission is grounded in the homefront where two reporters jockey to cover the crisis.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The moon plays an integral role in director Stanley Kubrick’s meditative 1968 classic, which ranks as IGN’s No. 1 on our list of the Top 100 sci-fi movies of all time. In the film, Dr. Heywood Floyd is tasked with investigating a mysterious object that’s been discovered on the moon, having been buried there 4 million years before.
This object – a tall, smooth black monolith – was first seen in the film’s prehistoric opening sequence, where a group of hominins encounter it. The monolith appears at various points in human technological evolution, from the moment a hominin learns to use a bone as a weapon (cue cinema’s greatest jump cut of all time) to humankind’s exploration of the moon and later Jupiter. What exactly the alien monolith means remains the subject of many cinephile essays.
Kubrick’s realistic depiction of the moon and space exploration in 2001 beget the long-standing conspiracy theory that Kubrick helped the US government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
