Romcom lovers rejoice: This week, moviegoers can watch the sparks fly between Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson in "Fly Me to the Moon," a chemistry lesson set against the backdrop of the Apollo space program. The film appears Thursday in theaters and on Apple TV+ later this year.
For Rick Stevens, a CU Boulder media scholar who studies, among other topics, pop culture and the challenges of communicating about science, the movie is ripe for discussion. "Fly Me to the Moon" pits Tatum, a fictional and buttoned down NASA director in the 1960s, against Johansson, a PR maven who's been hired to "sell the moon." It also pokes fun at conspiracy theories that have swirled around NASA for decades-one subplot follows Johansson's efforts to film a fake version of the moon landing, just in case the real one doesn't work out.
Stevens, an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies and self-described science and science fiction fan, saw "Fly Me to the Moon" during an advanced screening in Denver. He gives his take on what he calls a "wonderfully tense" popcorn flick-and why conspiracy theories around a fake moon landing have persisted more than 50 years later.
What did you think about 'Fly Me to the Moon' on your first watch?
The film is very effective, first of all, at returning the viewer to the heightened anxiety of that time. Today, we forget how much anxiety there was around the Cold War, around the Nixon administration around the Vietnam War, the counterculture movement, Civil Rights Movement, all of that.
It also captures the excitement of that time. Every time you see an Atlas rocket take off, the theater shakes.
What does the movie say about the challenges of communicating about science?
It does a great job getting the cultural conversations on the ground-thinking about this dual framework of NASA being an organization dedicated, of course, to science and putting people in environments where they hadn't been before.
At the same time, NASA has to hire PR firms to try to get the public to understand and get excited about science. For some of the characters, their job is to 'sell the moon': Why did Apollo matter? Why should we be excited?
How do the science-type characters react to that?
You see the resistance. That's what the film is ultimately about-the tension around engineers who take as given that their mission is going to be understood as good, and not liking the way their realities were being spun. That church and state separation between the public and the private sector is discussed quite a bit throughout the film. But NASA embraces that PR dark side, as it were, over and over. It's wonderfully tense.
