It’s not the first time that Roland Emmerich has wanted to destroy the Earth on the big screen, either with aliens (independence day), a giant monster (Godzilla), a severe cold snap (The day after), or simply the end of the world (2012). In Moonfall, in theaters since Wednesday, the German director takes the Moon out of its orbit and rushes it towards the Earth. Note the damage?
But the film is not only disaster, it questions the very nature of the Moon, which would not be what we believe. Mystery, already well ventilated in the trailers, and above all, confirmation that the Moon is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and fantasies for fiction, whether in literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Hergé…) or at the cinema. Immediate take off.
The moon will fall on your head
A meteorite Armageddon Where Deep Impact, it’s good. The Moon is better and bigger. moonfall is not the first to bring the natural satellite dangerously close to the Earth. It was the pitch for the Canadian mini-series Impact in 2003, where an asteroid hits the Moon and changes its orbit, but also the Machiavellian and megalomaniac project of Emperor Ming in the film Flash Gordon or Skull Kid in the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The super villain but not too Gru, he just wanted to pick up and steal the Moon in Despicable Me.
Man has never set foot on the moon
“One small step for man, one giant leap for humanity. This is the famous sentence uttered by Neil Armstrong when he set foot on the Moon on July 21, 1969. Well, on the Moon or in a Hollywood studio. This is perhaps the most well-known urban legend and conspiracy on the Moon. The Apollo 11 mission would never have gone to the Moon, it would be a fake moon landing, a staging, organized by the CIA and shot by a certain Stanley Kubrick in the middle of the Cold War and the space race with the USSR. Several films make fun of these theories, starting with the documenter Operation Moon by William Karel, but also the found footage Operation Avalanche, where two CIA agents infiltrate NASA, the comedy Moonwalkers with his fake Kubrick, or Capricorn One on a fake mission to… Mars.
The dark side of the moon
A hemisphere of the Moon is always invisible to us Earthlings. In fact, this “dark side” is not home to craters and pebbles, but to secret bases and other extraterrestrials. Necessarily. As early as the 2nd century, Lucian of Samosata imagined in True stories that the Moon was inhabited by an extraterrestrial race, the Selenites. Georges Méliès staged them in the cinema in 1902 in the essential Voyage dans la Lune. Fritz Lang also explores the dark side of the Moon in the silent film of 1929, The Woman of the Moon, one of the first so-called “serious” SF films. He could also have come across a Transformers left there, the cyborgs of Moontrapthe Nazis ofIron Skyor the monolith of 2001, a space odyssey.
The moon is made of cheese
Don’t laugh. Or not too much. Sourced from ancient tales, fable The Wolf and the Fox from La Fontaine to the proverbs of John Heywood, the myth of the Moon made of cheese was maintained over the centuries and works, until NASA made it
his april fools from 2002. If you still don’t believe us, watch the documentary A great excursion by Wallace & Gromit. And don’t forget the crackers.