My grandfather didn’t believe in the moon landings. It’s not like he thought deep about conspiracies. He was well into his 20s before cars started to become common. He saw a lot of change in his life. By the time the moon landings came along he was done believing new things.
Eh, if that had been true they would have done a second take on Neil Armstrong’s flubbed line “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
It’s their fault for hiring Ed Wood as the second unit director.
I think it looks pretty funny. “My Armstrong is a whiny little bitch!”
“I cannot accept that…” “They will shoot you.” “What is my budget?”
I’ve been confronted with conspiracy theorists before, and I challenge them to follow the history. I tell them to look up Robert Goddard, then Werner von Braun, and up through the Mercury, Gemini, and finally Apollo missions (and that’s not even getting into the political part of the space race). I know they won’t, because it’s too much work. It’s much easier to flip your brain off and say, “They faked it!” without even being able to say why.
For the movie, it looks like fun as long as you take it as entertainment.
I hated the idea of this from the minute I saw the trailer. I couldn’t even under stand if it was supposed to be an alternate history where they faked it or what but I didn’t care. As you say, the wrong time for this crap.
My exact words when I saw the trailer: “Yeah, that’s just what we need.”
It’s the perfect time. No one goes to the movies.
I thought Civil War was going to do harm because it was the wrong time to do it but it wound up being barely a little blip in pop culture.
Heh. Could you imagine if the entire thing is just two hours of set-up for a punchline? Like, we watch them deal with every setback as they cobble together the backup emergency hoax footage just in case — and, the moment it winds up not being needed, because the real mission is a success, an impressed Russian general who’s been on the periphery of the plot this whole time explains with heavy accent that, you know, we put the first satellite in orbit; we put the first man in space, the first woman in space; we pioneered advances with everything from telescopes to radar, but, amazingly, somehow you have beaten us to the moon. And if you’d faked it, we’d know, because of the satellites and the radar and the telescopes, like I was just saying.
Prompting our heroes to all stand around with stupid looks on their faces.
Trying to think logically here. A regular abort happened regularly in the space program. They could only be planning for something catastrophic. The only way it could work is if they plan on killing off the fake crew in the third act. The crew was world famous prior to the launch. Using possible movie plot logic, it’s important for the public to see them succeed. Then on the way back there is a fake accident and the crew is said to have died even though they died on the way to the moon.
He’s one of those crazies that think Oswald acted alone?
I concur, as we know exactly what would happen- Nixon had a prepared speech telling us the grave and sad news.
Not to mention the Russians- and why would they join into such a conspiracy?
who cares? You’re going to cater to the stupidest people in society now? Instead of releasing a sly comedy playing on the pervasive (but ridiculous) belief that the moon landing was faked, you want to pander to the idiots and are concerned that this film will give them ammunition for their absurd views? That’s no way for a civilized society to function.
I don’t really get your argument or why you think it was a ‘bizarre’ episode. You seem to be arguing that they were acting against their interests-- showing how the moon landing could have been faked while insisting that it wasn’t. But all of their setups and experiments were in service of busting various facets of the ‘fake moon landing’ myth: they failed to accurately reproduce things like walking in microgravity, showing that what was seen in the NASA moon walking videos was not possible to do in normal gravity; or demonstrated how ‘mistakes’ in the ‘fake’ pics and videos, such as lunar shadows that weren’t parallel, were not mistakes at all.
They’re Mythbusters, and they used science and careful reproduction techniques to bust one of the biggest myths of all time.
Exactly. But then, my hairdresser is too young and uneducated to know (or care about) the cold war.
OTOH, not all is lost: My best friend’s 17 year old daughter had heard of this movie and knew who was going to be in it. She definitely knows the score.
What I don’t get about moon landing deniers is do they deny that NASA and assorted foreign space programs have sent up satellites that are orbiting us? Do they deny GPS? Do they deny the Hubble Telescope? Do they deny the space stations and shuttles? Why is the moon landing so impossible if we are doing these other things?
I think it’s similar to people who believe that the Earth is flat-- it’s not about accepting common sense or established facts, it’s about feeling like an insider to an exclusive club, where you know secret facts that ‘they’ don’t want you to know. As with moon landing deniers, flat Earthers have to jump through a dizzying array of mental hoops to convince themselves of what they want to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary. Why do the Sun, Moon and planets we can see appear round if the Earth is flat? Why would people have lied about the Earth being round for literally thousands of years, since Aristotle first presented evidence of a round Earth? What possibly is to gain by lying about it, and who gains? Why can you get in a plane and apparently fly around the Earth-- is it a simulation to fool you?
There’s a good documentary called ‘Behind the Curve’ about flat Earthers-- used to be on Netflix, now it can be rented opn Prime or watched free with commercials on Tubi. The flat Earthers conduct scientific experiments to try to prove that the Earth is flat-- but every time those experiments instead point to the Earth being round, instead of admitting defeat and accepting facts, they move the goal posts and come up with increasingly convoluted explanations to themselves why the experiment ‘failed’ to show the ‘truth’ of the flat Earth.
This brings up another question. Are there any flat earthers who are not fundamentalist Christians? Are there any moon landing deniers who are not flat earthers?
So, okay that’s two questions.
I’ve met a number of people who are moon landing deniers but aren’t flat earthers.
In the documentary I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t get the sense that flat-eartherism was driven or had a particular basis in Christian fundamentalism-- I think it’s more what I said about wanting to belong to an exclusive ‘club’ where they felt they were privy to insider info.
There’s also an element of paranoia to it-- “they” don’t want you to know the truth, man! When the ‘star’ of the documentary, a guy named Mark, became popular within the movement and became the de facto face of flat-eartherism, there was a scene at a flat-earther convention where the others turned on him, accusing him of being a government plant 
The reason I asked is because what little I’ve watched on TV about these flat-earthers is their biblical fundamentalism. I remember one of them saying, “When Jesus descends to Earth during the Second Coming, all of the Earth will behold his descent. That can’t happen on a globe, so therefore the Earth is flat.”
I guess I just have a hard time accepting that otherwise reasonable people will believe the stupidest shit unless religion is involved.