Review: Fly Me to the Moon

Ben Stassen’s Fly Me to the Moon is in 3D because, without the glasses-required effects, not even a three-year-old would sit through it. In this animated feature, three young flies (who talk and dress like human kids) endeavor, in 1969, to hitch a ride aboard the Apollo 11 and make history as the first insects to reach the moon. The trio is inspired by Grandpa (Christopher Young), who accompanied Amelia Earhart on her groundbreaking flight across the Atlantic and espouses the belief that “If it ain’t an adventure, it ain’t worth doing!” What’s not worth doing, however, is enduring this rough draft of a film, which takes some pains to recreate famous NASA moments but otherwise can’t be bothered to significantly develop characters or conflicts that also come to involve some Russian commie flies—whose ability to instantly cross continents implies that they have the power of teleportation—intent on stopping their American counterparts from successfully returning to Earth.

Stassen’s animation is second-rate A Bug’s Life and his use of 3D is uninspired, relegated as it is to some protracted zooms and instances of liquid and/or objects flying toward the camera. Still, Fly Me to the Moon’s ho-hum aesthetics are a cut above the story, which is so lazy and banal it practically begs to be ignored. That’s certainly an easier task than figuring out the director’s decision to end the film with a batshit-insane Buzz Aldrin cameo in which the legendary astronaut “sets the record straight” about how this flies-in-space tale didn’t actually occur—because it would be a “scientific impossibility”—and, in the process, makes the contemporary lingo-spouting, jeans jacket-wearing insect protagonists (whose response is, “What is he talking about?”) seem ordinary by comparison.