Two major movies about space travel were released in early July: Space Cadet on Prime Video on July 4, and Fly Me to the Moon in theaters on July 12. Both are lighthearted romantic comedies that heavily feature astronauts and NASA.
Scarlett Johansson stars in Fly Me to the Moon as a marketing maven hired to “sell” the American people on the idea of the moon, employing trickery (and even a staged version of the moon landing) to do so. Channing Tatum plays a no-nonsense launch director focused on highlighting the accomplishments of scientists and astronauts.
In Space Cadet, space exploration is now a hot commodity. Emma Roberts stars as a Florida party girl who is accidentally accepted into an astronaut training program after falsifying her resume. While the movie celebrates the hard work astronauts do to actually make it into orbit, the message is more about following your dreams even if you haven’t had a conventional path to success.
So many space-related blockbusters, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Interstellar, focus on the harrowing nature of the great unknown and lean into its terror. Though the movies have distinct tones — Space Cadet is a chaotic nod to Legally Blonde set in the modern era, and Fly Me to the Moon is more of a silly reimagining of a real-life event set in 1969 — they both take a lighthearted approach to the ambitious goal of space exploration.
These two movies both coming out in July might have something to do with the fact that astronauts first landed on the moon in July of 1969, 55 years ago. The studios also might have chosen to release these films on and around July 4 because space exploration feels inherently patriotic and hopeful. It was a U.S. flag that was first planted on the moon, after all, after a years-long space race with Russia. That was just a few years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — who had promised we’d land on the moon in the 1960s — and in the middle of the Vietnam War.
President Richard Nixon captured the idealism of the moon in his 1969 inauguration speech, which is included in part in Fly Me to the Moon: “We find ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but failing into raucous discord on Earth.”
In Fly Me to the Moon, the American people need to be reminded that going to space is a marvelous dream in order to distract them from the aforementioned “discord on Earth” and to secure funding for the mission. In the movie, a mysterious representative from the White House emphasizes that it’s so important that NASA successfully lands on the moon, they hire a team to fake it just in case it fails. It’s just that important to the nation’s morale.
Space Cadet assumes we all know that going to space is one of the coolest things a person can do. Roberts’s character, a gator-wrangling bartender and amateur inventor, appears on NASA’s grounds clad in an airbrushed T-shirt and platform flip-flops, with nothing but untapped potential and enthusiasm. Her more buttoned-up classmates in astronaut training school are genius engineers, pilots and mathematicians, but she manages to hold her own with pure strength of spirit.
Roberts’s character Rex isn’t real, inspired by anyone real or even technically realistic, but when she finally makes it to space and takes in the majesty of the innumerable stars, she speaks on behalf of everyone on Earth by declaring, “This is rad.”
Roberts told Yahoo Entertainment that she, like most people, isn’t really cut out for space travel — ”too nauseous and anxious all the time,” she said — but there’s still something beautiful about the stories we tell about it.
“I love space. It sounds dumb, but I do. My son is 3 and a half, and … the other night [while looking at the sky] he said, ‘There’s so many stars!’ and I was like, ‘There are!’” she said. “Humans are endlessly fascinated by space. There’s something so hopeful about it. It’s just so beautiful that we know so much, yet so little about it. The fact that even a three-year-old could appreciate the stars — that tells you everything you need to know.”
