Fly Me to the Moon (2008)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Overrated and overhyped

Nice effects though.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It's a movie for kids. I understand that. I watched it with my 6 year old and she liked it, so I'll cut it a bit of slack - and in any event you can't apply the same standards to a kids movie that you would apply to a movie intended for mature audiences. Having said that ...I've seen G-rated movies that were a lot better than this. The attempt here is to mix a story about 3 young flies who hitch a ride to the moon with Apollo 11 in 1969 in with a bit of the actual story of Apollo 11. So if a child watches this they'll learn about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and even a bit about the Cold War. Nothing wrong with that. Some of the animation (especially some of the space flight scenes, the animated portrayal of the capsule and the scenery backdrops) was very well done. But set against all that are the weaknesses of the movie.First, I didn't care for either the animated people or the animated flies. The flies came across as too anthropomorphic. I know nobody wants to see realistic-looking flies and maggots in a cartoon, but these ones came across as just too cutesy. These are flies! And strangely, with the flies being too anthropomorphic, the animated humans came across as too cartoonish. They didn't look realistic at all. The Cold War - as I noted - serves as a backdrop to this (appropriately, since the Cold War was the backdrop to the actual times) but having flies involved in the Cold War? Yes, there were the evil Russian flies and the good American flies. That was a little too much. And then there was Buzz Aldrin's real-life walk on at the end of the movie. I can't really figure out what purpose his walk-on served. It seemed a gigantic piece of nothing, and lasted all of about 30 seconds. I have nothing against cute kids movies. I've rated more than a few quite highly. This one, though, is not one of the better I've seen.

This is not a good movie. Too preachy in parts and the story line was sub par. The 3D was OK, but not superb. I almost fell asleep in this movie.The story is about 3 young flies that want to have adventure and follow up on it. The characters are lacking, I truly do not care about these characters and feel that there was nothing to keep an adult interested. Pixar this is not.I would have liked to see more special 3D effects. Also I wold like to see more fly jokes than the mom constantly saying "Lord of the flies" Pretty sexist in showing the women as house wives and fainting.

Okay, so, someone, somewhere, a few years ago, thought it would be a good idea to make a 3D IMAX movie about some flies stowing away aboard the Apollo 11 and going to the moon. So they did. Someone, somewhere, was an idiot.I want to give the artists props for doing their homework on the hardware. As far as I can tell, the rockets and the launch hardware were bang on. The graphics in general were pretty good - the rocket launch gave me chills, like a good rocket launch always does (my Popular Mechanics flying-car gearhead blood still runs strong) and the 3D was pretty effective. The CG wasn't Pixar-quality, but it was generally good. The flies were kinda mediocre anthropomorphics, with some half-assed late-60s characters thrown in for colour (hippie flies, African-American flies with giant afros and black shades, etc.) and the maggots looked more like grubs with human baby heads (although they made suitably gross squelching noises).The scriptwriters certainly did not do their homework, relying on offensive and outdated clichés (60s gender politics including mostly-useless female characters, racial stereotypes, evil Russians, a fat fly who only wants to eat, grade-two level gross-out humour). In a movie aimed for IMAX, they blew a wonderful opportunity to sneak in some educational content about physics and space travel - they didn't get their physics right (zero-g in the Lunar Module during landing burn? PLEASE.) They couldn't even be bothered to read the original radio transcripts between Houston and the astronauts, all of which is in the public domain; instead they wrote their own dialogue, which sounds like crap.But we liked the maggots.So they get a point and a half for rockets and maggots. Uh, yay. 1.5/5.

I read today a horrible review for this film by yet another jaded reviewer. It was by far one of the nastiest reviews I've read by one of these monkeys in a long time. Look, this is not a perfect film, but it is neither a bad film. So often reviewers seem to want all films to be Dr. Zivago or Gone With the Wind, or whatever is politically correct at the time. Point is, see movies for what they are intended to be. What a concept.So what is this film all about? It is a movie for kids that is in all honesty not up to Pixar standards, but not a bad film at all. The main purpose is to inspire a new generation of kids to explore and is very pro space exploration. It is so important to give young people something special to which they can aspire. As such, I think this film succeeds quite well. The 3D effects were very good, and definitely eye popping! So go and take they young ones, this is an event they will remember, and who knows, one day a man or woman may set foot on the moon or even Mars, and credit this film with inspiring them! That is what it is all about! The best review of this film came form a young girl, who as she exited the theater proclaimed to all, "this is the greatest film ever!". That review from the target audience pretty much says it all!