With "Moonfall", the Moon is the source of all fantasies in cinema

• Moonfall

  is Roland Emmerich's new disaster film, where the Moon veers dangerously from Earth and turns out to be more mysterious than expected.

• The Moon has always been a source of inspiration and fantasies for cinema, whether man has never set foot there or whether it hides aliens or Nazis.

• In fact, the Moon is made of cheese, Wallace & Gromit say so.

It's not the first time that Roland Emmerich has wanted to destroy the Earth on the big screen, whether with aliens (

), a giant monster (

), a big cold snap (

), or simply the end of the world (

).

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 à la

or

is fine.

The Moon is better and bigger.

isn't the first to bring Earth's natural satellite dangerously close.

It was the pitch of the Canadian mini-series

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

or Skull Kid in the game.

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

by William Karel, but also the found footage 

where two CIA agents infiltrate NASA, the comedy

 with his fake Kubrick, or

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

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

, the Nazis of

, or the monolith of

The moon is made of cheese

Don't laugh.

Or not too much.

Rooted in ancient stories, from the fable

by 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 make it his April Fool's joke of 2002. If you still don't believe us, watch the

Wallace & Gromit documentary

And don't forget the crackers.

Science

VIDEO.

50 years of the man on the Moon: Our selection of films to watch under the stars

Movie theater

"Journey to the Moon": What are the influences that punctuate this musical and animated tale?

• science fiction

• Movie theater

• Moon

• neil armstrong

• 0 comment

• 0 share

  • Share on Messenger

  • Share on Facebook

  • Share on Twitter

  • Share on Flipboard

  • Share on Pinterest

  • Share on Linkedin

  • Send by Mail

• To safeguard

• A fault ?

• To print