3 Good 3 Bad: Movies on the Moon

[nextpage title=”NEXT” ]When you look up into the night sky, you might see it hovering amid the stars and wonder about your place in the universe, but in the movies, it’s home to all sorts of delights (E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial as seen above), though you can bet most are pretty scary … or silly. While there have been a lot of movies with the word ‘moon’ in the title, there’s been a significant less that have actually been about or taken place on our closest astronomical neighbor. From real life adventures of Man’s own trek to the lunar surface to tales of sci-fi fantasy and beyond, here are 3 good and 3 bad movies that take place on or around our moon.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]

Apollo 13

Right away, probably the most famous movie about the moon is surely Ron Howard‘s 1995 biographical adaptation of the 1970 failed seventh flight to the Moon. Starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton, among many others, its follows the crew into space when a small explosion derails NASA’s agenda, instantly shifting the routine lunar landing into an emergency mission to save the lives of three men trapped on a vessel with limited power and oxygen. While the Moon itself is actually seen rarely in the movie, with archival footage of Neil Armstrong‘s famous decent and a short sort of daydream of one astronaut imagining himself on the surface, its presence is always felt, like a magnet that lures these people to great risks and acts heroism both in space and back on Earth. One of the best space movies ever made.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]

IRON SKY

You can’t fault this sci-fi action film for lack of creativity, at least when it comes to the story. Set in 2018, the female US President (Stephanie Paul) reignites the space program by sending astronauts back to the Moon, specifically a black man (Christopher Kirby) – “Black to the Moon” is a common early theme – but once there, encounter, of all things, Nazis. Yup, after their loss in 1945, they retreated to the Moon of all places and set up a secret base on the dark side where they waited and studied, preparing for a new attack to take over the world. Purposefully cheesy and rife with dark humor, this one sure had great potential but is a snoozer to be sure, with poor direction and passable acting, not to mention the B-grade visual effects and sound design. Amazingly enough, yup, there is a sequel coming this year.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]

2001: A Space Odyssey

While much of Stanley Kubrick‘s monumental sci-fi epic takes place on a journey to Jupiter, a good portion of the start is set on traveling to and spending time on the Moon. Trying to explain what the film is about has preoccupied critics, scholars, and philosophers for more than forty years, but in simplest terms, Man encounters a large black monolith at certain stages in our evolution, seemingly steering us to an uncertain destiny. Already confusing, right? Well, be that as it may, on the Moon, scientist have found one such monolith buried beneath the surface, left there 4 million years earlier. Odd. Well, it only gets weirder from there, in this startling imaginative and breathtaking adventure that is certainly a challenge but nonetheless a visually and thought-provoking experience. This is one trippy ride to the Moon.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]

Apollo 18

Sporting a clever tagline: “There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the Moon,” this sci-fi horror film is shot in the trendy found-footage style, telling the story of a group of astronauts who were lost on the surface and the video of their fate only recently discovered. Staring in 1974, the mission of the crew is top secret, working with the Department of Defense to install special detectors on the lunar surface to track any incoming ICBMs our enemies might try launching at us. Once there though, things go dark when they come upon a Soviet lander and a dead cosmonaut, and then much worse when the realize what killed him. They are not alone. While it’s got a creepy idea for a story, this has almost zero scares and is just another predictable, bland horror film in an already tired genre. Take off as soon as you can.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]

MOON

Director Duncan Jones has had a short and roller-coaster-ish ride helming some visually-stunning films, however, his greatest accomplishment is still this feature length debut. Set on the Moon in a near future, a devastating oil and energy crisis has been avoided when a company called Lunar Industries has found a way to mine an alternative fuel source, building a facility on the surface that only needs one man to run it. He is Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), and along with an artificial intelligence robot-like device named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), he lives in isolation until he makes a startling discovery after a series of strange hallucinations and ailments: he literally finds himself, unconscious in a nearby rover. How is it possible? Where did he come from? Why is he here? Getting the answers causes both of them to face some challenging questions and keeps the audience not only in suspense but filled with our own mind-bending theories. The whole film takes place on the Moon and is really one of the best sci-fi films ever made. Read more about our thoughts on this movie here.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]

MOON ZERO TWO

So here’s one you probably never heard of, and honestly, that’s sort of a good thing. Set in the year 2021, the Moon is now being colonized (ah, there was such high hopes in those early days of space exploration), and much like Earth below, cities are popping up and populated by all kinds of people with all kinds of motivations. One such man is a disreputable millionaire named J. J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchell) who learns of a giant asteroid rich with sapphire, an element crucial to a new rocket engine he can profit from. However, bringing it to the surface would be illegal, so he ropes in the reluctant Bill Kemp (James Olson) through nefarious methods, though this is only the start of all sorts of problems for Kemp in this cheesy, absurd drama that was so bad, it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Some might call that an honor. It’s really the only way you’d ever get through this mess.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”PREVIOUS” ]

BONUS: A TRIP TO THE MOON

Let’s hop into the wayback machine and turn the dial to 1902, to a time with movies were nothing more than a few random flickering black & white images that lasted more than a minute. Then came Georges Méliès‘ A Trip to the Moon, a movie that told a real story, had startling special effects and was considerably longer than anything most were used to, running over ten minutes. A silent film (of course), it follows a group of scientists who build a simple rocket and fly to the Moon where they encounter a strange world of plants and animals and a race of humanoids who are become hostile when the humans are able to kill them with little force. A fantastical journey of imagination, a recently discovered hand-colored print (1993) has been restored with an all new soundtrack and can seen here. It’s well worth it, one wrote about before.[/nextpage]