Flynn said the initial idea for the movie came in 2016. As the nation wrangled with questions about truth during a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump frequently castigated the “lying” media, the moon landing made for a perfect setting.

“That was the assignment,” Flynn said. “How do you have your cake and eat it, too? You have fun with the fake moon landing, but you really bring home that truth matters by highlighting that achievement.”

Gilroy said that she had read some books to better understand the conspiracy but that there was simply nothing to them.

“We wanted to build a story around the idea of these people coming together to ensure that the mission is real,” she said. “Not in any of my research did I ever come across one iota of a fact that made me question in any way the validity of this accomplishment.”

Adam Frank, an astronomer and physicist at the University of Rochester whose work focuses on science denial, said pop culture had a responsibility to fight a nihilistic tendency to doubt science and human potential.

“It’s lazy writing to say ‘The government was in on the conspiracy’ as opposed to ‘People actually all worked together and they found the answer,’” Frank said. “They worked for 20 years and sent a probe to Mars and it did exactly what they said they were going to do. Somehow, that is less exciting than ‘It didn’t work and they had a conspiracy.’”

Fly Me to the Moon does focus on the laborious team effort that went into the landing. But now that it’s easier than ever to take an image out of context and spread it online, good intentions can be lost. Fretting about the film may also be quaint at this point: Images generated by artificial intelligence showing a faked-moon-landing film set went viral earlier this year.

Lawrence Hamilton, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire who studies anti-science conspiracy belief, pointed to an image used by moon-landing deniers as a cautionary tale. The photo, showing astronauts without their helmets during a training exercise at the Kennedy Space Center, has been shared repeatedly on social media over the years.

“They said, ‘This is them faking the moon landing, and it’s proof,’” he recalled. “And they will do the same thing with clips from this movie. They’ll do whatever it takes to say, ‘This proves what we’ve said all along.’”

For people who don’t have strong memories of watching the moon landing, that influence can be strong. In a 2021 national survey, Hamilton found that only 12% of respondents believed that the moon landings were faked, but that millennials were more likely than other generations to deny it happened.

Generation Zers were more likely to be unsure if it happened. A recent TikTok filter asking users to rank things on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how much they believe in them, with 1 being more likely and 10 being less likely, inspired multiple videos with people placing the moon landing below things such as God, magic and ghosts. But a few popular videos doesn’t mean Gen Zers are flocking to moon-landing conspiracies en masse, as the survey shows.

One person who isn’t worried about the movie unintentionally bolstering conspiracy beliefs is actor Anna Garcia, who plays Ruby, an assistant to Johansson’s character.

“I think if someone’s really dumb, they’ll definitely get that message,” Garcia told Variety at the movie’s premiere. “I think if someone is sort of dumb as rocks, they’ll be like, ‘It was fake.’”

Fly Me to the Moon is in NZ cinemas now.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Annie Aguiar

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