One of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind happened on July 21, 1969 when Neil Armstrong became the first person from Earth to walk on another celestial body, in this case, the Moon. We, as a united civilization, were taking our very first step out of the cradle that birthed us. But weirdly enough, within just a few years from that momentous event, a conspiracy theory started to float around that the moon landing was actually faked, with the footage shown on television around the world being shot in a secret studio on an undisclosed military base. Some variations of the conspiracy alleged that genius filmmaker Stanley Kubrick oversaw the production.
It is easy to see how some people may have bought into the theory, considering that during the turbulent 1970s confidence in the federal government was at a low. But every argument put forward as “proof” of the conspiracy theory has been thoroughly and credibly debunked. As fiction though, lunar landing conspiracy theories still hold some storytelling potential. Over the years there have have been a few movies that have used such conspiracy theories as the basis for films, most recently the rom-com Fly Me To The Moon.
Now we should note that we are intentionally not including in this survey any films that seriously entertain the idea that the moon landings or any aspect of the US space program was or is actively being faked as part of some real conspiracy. (The inclusion of the documentary Room 237 is the exception which you will see below.) That kind of anti-history/anti-science thinking is just dumb. But we are going to take a look at the films that took that idea and rightfully retained it in the realm of fiction.
Capricorn One
Perhaps the best known film about the faking of an event in the space race, 1977’s Capricorn One is a thriller that tells a story of not a moon landing being faked, but the faking of the first landing on Mars. James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O. J. Simpson star as the astronauts who are removed from their space capsule just prior to launch, following the discovery of a faulty life support system that would have killed them during their voyage to Mars. Since another NASA accident could lead to the organization’s funding being drastically cut – and affecting thousands of workers and, perhaps more importantly, the profits of a number of NASA contractors – the decision is made to fake the Mars landing at a makeshift TV studio set up at an abandoned military base. Elliot Gould is the reporter who discovers the subterfuge and races to find the astronauts before they are killed as part of the coverup. Released in 1978, director Peter Hyams had originally written the script for Capricorn One back in 1972, but was only able to get producers interested in it after the Watergate scandal broke and the idea of government conspiracies was on everyone’s mind.
Moonwalkers
Tom Kidman (Ron Perlman) is a CIA agent assigned to recruit filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to fake film footage of the Apollo 11 mission landing on the moon as a contingency in case some accident befalls the mission. Jonny Thorpe (Rupert Grint) is a down-on-his-luck band manager who owes some local London mobsters a sum of money much larger than what he currently has. The two accidentally meet, with Kidman mistaking Jonny for Kubrick’s agent, and Jonny not necessarily dissuading him of that idea. By the time Kidman realizes he was duped, the big suitcase of cash Kidman handed over to Jonny to fund the project has been stolen by the aforementioned mobsters. With approximately a week to the launch, Kidman and Jonny rush to complete the film before the CIA turns up asking questions. The first of two films to come out in 2015 to tackle the lunar landing conspiracy theory as a comic thriller – see also Operation: Avalanche below – Moonwalkers is a bit more of the uneven of the two. Still, there are a few solid laughs and director brings some visual flair to Kidman’s Vietnam trauma flashbacks.
Operation: Avalanche
Upon hearing that there might be a Soviet spy hidden in NASA’s Apollo program, ambitious CIA agents – and closet film nerds – Matt Johnson, Owen Williams, Andy Apelle, and Jared Raab convince their superiors that they can go undercover at the space agency as a documentary film crew to root out the mole. When they discover that NASA will not be able to land a man on the moon until 1971 at the earliest – and thus failing to live up to President Kennedy’s challenge to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s, a disastrous outcome for the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union – they come up with a brilliant plan to fake the moon landing. The twist to the story is that they are going to fool most of NASA with their ploy and outside of NASA chief James Webb and the three astronauts themselves, no one will know of their subterfuge. Operation: Avalanche is a clever low budget film, balancing its needs to be both a comedy and a thriller. Shot as a found footage feature, director Matt Johnson (who will go on to 2023’s exceptional BlackBerry) does a remarkable job in its period detail. Fans of Kubrick may appreciate how the film shows how the front projection system the director used to achieve some of the effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey worked.
Room 237
Room 237 is a documentary about director Stanley Kubrick’s landmark film The Shining and some of the more outré critical interpretations that have sprung up around the film. One such interpretation, according to conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner who is quoted in the film, is that the front screen projection process that the director utilized in the the opening segment of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey was used “in part [as] a research and development project for the Apollo footage that was shot.” Weidner goes on to say that while the Apollo missions did go to the moon, what images we saw of those landings was faked by Kubrick. He also claims that “Hollywood special effects people from the 60s and 70s, front screen projection experts, tell me that I have absolutely nailed the Apollo footage as being the result of front screen projection.” The Shining, therefore, becomes a way for Kubrick to admit to what he did with the deviations from Stephen King’s original novel in the film being clues planted by Kubrick. While Weidner name-checks another moon landing conspiracy theorist, he never states who those “Hollywood special effects people” nor gives a reason as to why the footage had to be faked even though the landing actually happened. The documentary makes no direct judgement about this claim, but the fact that there are questions that it doesn’t defend against perhaps says something.
Diamonds Are Forever
Over the course of James Bond’s six decades of adventures on the silver screen, he has found himself interacting with outer space a few times, whether it be the hijacking of space capsules in You Only Live Twice or stowing away aboard a space shuttle whose destination is a genocidal maniac’s space station in Moonraker. But in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, comes the most puzzling space-related plot moment of the franchise. Sure the titular diamonds are a key component in a space-based laser weapon being developed by his old nemesis Blofeld and SPECTRE. But that’s not what concerns us here. Midway through the film, Sean Connery’s Bond has infiltrated a facility out in the Nevada desert while on the trail of some smuggled diamonds. He is discovered and while making his escape, he runs through a soundstage which has a mockup of the lunar surface and two men dressed in spacesuits pretending to astronauts collecting moon rocks. Bond hops into their lunar rover – which he manages to figure out how to drive after just pushing a few random buttons – and literally smashes out of the facility to make his escape across the desert. The moments serves as nothing more than a setup to give Bond a vehicle, the moon buggy, in which to escape. But given that the astronauts’ spacesuits sport NASA patches and the Apollo moon missions program was still in full swing when the film was released, it does suggest that SMERSH may have been faking a lunar landing for some unknown purpose, possibly for the US government. Although, since it is never addressed in the film or the screenplay, it can probably be more written off as a joke from screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz.
Interstellar
Not really a fictional account about a faking of a moon landing so much as it incorporates the idea of one of these ridiculous conspiracy theories being used for political ends. In director Christopher Nolan’s film, it is the year 2067 and years of blight and environmental collapse has caused worldwide foot shortages. As such, the United States government has assigned numerous people to become farmers in lieu of other professions. Another way that governments try to people to concentrate on solving Earth’s problems and not think about “escaping to the stars,” was by suddenly claiming that the moon landings ever actually happened. It is during a Parent-Teacher Conference that Matthew McConaughey’s Joseph Cooper – a former test pilot forced into farming – is told that his daughter’s “old Federal” history text book has been replaced with the “corrected versions” which “explain how the Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union.” He, of course, is rightly horrified. But it is a clever use of the lunar landing conspiracy theory by screenwriter Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan. And of course in the end, the reason for embracing the conspiracy theory turned out to be entirely wrong, and that the solution to mankind’s problems, and indeed its very future, does indeed lie out there in the stars.
