NASA made good use of the vault within a vault. The outer vault was where the space agency kept archival materials, classified documents, and other papers that weren’t meant to be released to the public. The inner vault was where they kept the materials that weren’t even meant for people inside NASA. That’s where the Apollo 1 tape was stored: the voices from the cockpit of the spacecraft when astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in a fire on the launch pad on January 27, 1967.
Virtually no one ever heard the Apollo 1 tape until NASA finally declassified it as part of a wide release of Apollo-era recordings in 2018, and the recording made its way onto the internet. It’s barely 20 seconds long, but once you hear it, the sounds of the spacecraft—White yelling, “Hey, we’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”; Chaffee letting out a raw, terrifying death scream—are forever inaudible. It’s deeply primal, deeply personal, and should never have been released.
It is a credit to the film Fly me to the moona new comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum about faking the Apollo 11 moon landingthat it opens with fire and is in fact a tribute to the lost astronauts. It is the film’s ultimate shame that it uses the actual shot – not once, but twice – and violates the privacy of the lost men in the service of a Hollywood confection.
The filmmakers behind Fly me to the moondirected by TV super-producer Greg Berlanti, must pride themselves on having done their homework in ways big and small, with the authenticity of the tape being a prime example. Several scenes in the film take place at Wolfie’s Restaurant and the Holiday Inn Cocoa Beach, both of which were landmarks on Cape Canaveral in the early days of the space program. The average age of engineers in Mission Control is estimated to be 26, which is exactly what it was. As the three Apollo 11 astronauts are led to the van that will take them to the launch pad, two of them—the two who will walk on the moon—are seen wearing large gray rectangles on the back of their spacesuits, to which their life-support backpacks are attached, while the third astronaut’s suit is completely white. Missing such a subtle detail would probably go unnoticed by most people, but it would immediately give away the existence of the game to space buffs and historians.
But then there’s the film’s storyline. The long-standing faked moon landing conspiracy fantasy was based on the story that NASA knew in 1969 that it couldn’t meet President John F. Kennedy’s 1969 deadline to have American astronauts on the lunar surface, so the celebrated first moonwalk was actually recorded on a sound stage. Some stories have an anonymous director leading the fake operation; some have Stanley Kubrick, because, uh, there was something about 2001: A Space OdysseyIt is this story – without Kubrick – that Fly me to the moon features Johansson as the advertising executive behind the fraud, Tatum as a straightforward flight controller who is initially taken in by the ruse, and Woody Harrelson as a James McCord-esque official in the Nixon administration who pressures Johansson to join the company.
The story moves along smoothly enough. The soundstage is convincing; the mock-up of the lunar module looks wonderfully authentic; and the cables under which the actor-astronauts bounce to simulate one-sixth the moon’s gravity actually give them the kangaroo hop that was the signature gait of the real moonwalkers. When the cables tangle and leave the astronauts hanging in midair, the (real) film elicits a loud laugh as the exasperated (fake) director orders, “Just let them hang there and think about what they’ve done.”
But all of this is in service of what, exactly? In a telling moment, Tatum’s character learns the truth about the cosmic forgery and warns Johansson’s character that if it gets out, everything positive NASA has done will be called into question, and all the goodwill it has built up will be destroyed. The text is set in 1969, but the loss of faith in public institutions feels very much like 2024.
Former President Donald Trump made it his campaign money to cast doubt on the integrity of the FBI, the Justice Department, the CDC, NATO, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and virtually all of his political opponents. Trump, however, is merely the ne plus ultra of a long decline in national confidence. When the moon landings occurred, the U.S. military was viewed with great suspicion because of the devastation of the Vietnam War. The entire executive branch was discredited shortly thereafter as Watergate unfolded. That mess was followed by Iran-Contra, the impeachment of Clinton, the false claim of weapons of mass destruction that led to the Iraq War, and the collapse of the financial markets because of the massive fraud in mortgage-backed securities.
And that wasn’t all. Politicians lied about the Affordable Care Act (death panels!), about President Obama (born in Kenya!), about the 2020 elections (stolen!). Sports have been plagued by deception: juicing and alleged juicing by Lance Armstrong, Bobby Bonds, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire; sign-stealing by the Houston Astros; Tom Brady and his deflated footballs. Congress, once august, has descended into catcalling chaos, with presidents booed during State of the Union addresses, both parties retreating to their extremist corners, and the likes of Anthony Weiner and George Santos leaving in disgrace.
All of this is fresh ground for deep cynicism. Conspiracy theories have always existed: people have been litigating the Kennedy assassination for 61 years. Flat-Earthers predate JFK by centuries. But recent generations, with climate change denial, anti-vaccine nonsense, and 9/11 lies, have only seen things get worse, as social media serves as an accelerator for divisive, totally unverified nonsense. Into this mix comes Fly me to the moonYes, it is an exaggeration to say that a simple work of popular entertainment will lead to an even greater decline in our faith in public institutions in general and NASA in particular.
“Media tend to reflect more than just the cause of attitudes,” says Joseph Parent, a professor of political science at Notre Dame University and co-author of the book American conspiracy theories“In our book, we looked at causal relationships between popular presentations of conspiracy theories and the prevalence of conspiracy theories. Nothing wrong with that. I’m sure someone somewhere was influenced, but overall it didn’t really help.”
If the parent is right, Fly me to the moon is more symptom than source of our growing doubts about our institutions. The film can be seen as the mild diversion that it is—and it is certainly entertaining enough—but also as one more sign of our cultural fever, our infection with the bacteria of public distrust. NASA, one might argue, deserves this kind of treatment less than almost any other segment of the culture. For 66 years, the space agency has accomplished sublime things—robots on Mars, boots on the moon, spacecraft that slalom through the rings and moons of the outer planets. NASA and America have paid a terrible price, too—Grissom, White, Chaffee, the Challenger crew, the Colombia crew. The deaths were real, the triumphs were real, the nine manned lunar missions were clearly real.
Fly me to the moon can have its fun. But it is fun that has a spiritual price.
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.