Fly Me to the Moon is not a great movie. It’s not even a good movie. In some ways, it’s barely passable. Yet, despite a litany of criticisms that I could level against it, all of them will fall on deaf ears — so long as those ears are attached to children roughly five to 10 years of age. What matters an absence of plot when compared to cute little astro-flies? What matters a story so thin it is nearly transparent when the magic of 3-D glasses allows for the ability to swoop and soar through the air and even into outer space?
Young Nat (Trevor Gagnon) grew up listening to his grandfather’s (Christopher Lloyd) stories about tagging along with Amelia Earhart on her famed solo flight across the Atlantic. So when the chance comes for him to have his own adventure and prove to his worrywart mom that not all dreams get swatted, Nat jumps at the chance. Enlisting his two best friends, IQ (Philip Daniel Bolden) and Scooter (David Gore), Nat hitches a ride with Neal Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon. While their earthbound families agonize from afar, Nat and the gang revel in weightless flight, stroll the lunar surface, and, at one point, save the mission from near certain disaster.
Reported to be the first animated film in 3-D, Fly Me to the Moon has a crudely unsophisticated, threadbare plot folded into the actual events of history; is saddled with a rote, uninteresting script; and appears to have been animated using software decades out of date. Before you start sending in rabid letters to the editor over my applying the same template for a kid’s movie as I do an Oscar contender, may I remind you of the genius of this summer’s earlier animated offering, WALL*E. Fly Me to the Moon is fascinating, if for no other reason than it reveals how many light years ahead of everyone else Pixar is. They did Fly Me to the Moon (minus the stuff in outer space) 10 years ago — it was called A Bug’s Life.
Parents, don’t go expecting anything for you. Unlike Pixar, who consistently infuses their digital delights with enough humor aimed over kids’ heads to make the trip to the theater worthwhile for adults, Fly Me to the Moon is going to feel like 84 minutes of torture. It’s a safe bet that kids over 10 are going to be equally bored. Sure, the 3-D is fun, but a gimmick, no matter how impressive, does not an entertaining movie make.
This film contains one of the most anachronistic subplots I’ve ever seen. As Apollo 11 circles the moon, Russian flies back on Earth prepare to sabotage their return flight home. Forty years beyond the events depicted in the film, the Soviet fly spies, practically twirling mustaches and speaking through pointy teeth are not simply out-dated, they are a revolution too late. Their villainy doesn’t even work on a nostalgic level.
Fly Me to the Moon feels like a much longer version of a kid-friendly movie one would see while visiting one of NASA’s space centers. The film is, in essence, an advertisement for NASA for kids. And while I can think of few other organizations that deserve publicity more, the fact that the Belgian film was made independent of the space agency makes it all the more peculiar. The filmmakers used actual transcripts from the moon landing and the original blueprints to construct as accurate a recreation of the events as possible. And many of the visuals and meticulous attention to detail, insofar as the Apollo spacecraft are concerned, are truly impressive. It’s too bad the filmmakers didn’t lavish that sort of sumptuous consideration on the rest of the film.
Still, if this film introduces the youngest among us to the majesty that is space exploration and whets their appetites for NASA’s forthcoming return to the moon, then this profoundly disappointing film will have contributed something worthwhile.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
