A long trip for a small step
Space exploration has been featured in films since long before Apollo. In 1902, A Trip to the Moon — inspired in part by Verne’s aforementioned novel — proved that sci-fi could thrive in the new medium of movies.
Sci-fi’s vision of spaceflight evolved as the decades passed, of course. “The [portrayals] that are focused on the reality of what’s going on and realistic space programs tend to fall away in the 1960s, because they can’t really compete with the real thing,” Weitekamp says. “And so what you get are more extrapolated visions of what spaceflight could be,” as in Star Trek.
When the Apollo missions kicked off and people realized that going to the Moon wasn’t just a fantasy anymore, another prominent theme began to develop in sci-fi, says literature professor Brian Willems. Willems, of the University of Split in Croatia, studies how the Moon has appeared throughout the history of film. When it comes to the Moon landings, he says, it’s the journey, not the target, which really captured our imaginations.
For example, the film Countdown (1968) depicts the first Moon landing, but it primarily focuses on the challenge of getting to the surface instead of what happens next. In the movie, when Americans learn the Soviet Union will likely reach the Moon first, they abandon the Apollo program for a quicker backup plan: They send a lone astronaut on a oneway trip and plan to coordinate his return later. Like the real-life space race, the movie’s entire premise is beating the Soviets to the Moon.
“It was all about traveling to the Moon and the ability to do it, rather than about some experience on the Moon itself,” Willems says. He suggests such pre-Apollo 11 films reflect the real-life Apollo missions, in that their primary purpose was to highlight the American pride and sense of accomplishment that would come with besting the Soviet Union.