Justine Smith

While novelists like Jules Verne imagined what it would be like to travel to worlds beyond our own, it was with the invention of cinema that made us reach for the stars. Directors like Georges Méliès, cinema’s first magician, made these dreams concrete with films like A Trip to the Moon (1902), creating some of the medium’s most iconic images in the process. Over the next 60 years, leading up to the first moon landing, it was on the silver screen where our extraterrestrial dreams took hold.

Aside from Méliès, who took audiences into fantastical space worlds, only a handful of filmmakers — like Fritz Lang with Woman in the Moon (1929) — had the otherworldly aspirations to depict new landscapes of exploration on celluloid. These dreamlike depictions of discovery seem unquestionably linked to testing the limits of a new medium. Exploring worlds outside our own was inevitable for an art form that was just taking shape. As a genre, though, science-fiction really only took off in the aftermath of the Second World War, alongside the growing tensions of the Cold War.

During the 1950s, there was an influx of movies that imagined what it would be like to make it to outer space. Films like Destination Moon (1950), produced in the shadow of the nuclear arms race, took a dramatic approach with allusions to the actual space race happening in the real world. The film’s underlying motivator was a paranoid need to colonize outer space before new threats colonized us. In other science-fiction films — like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which indulged in space fantasy by including aliens — the narrative was also primarily rooted in fear. While no one sets foot off the planet in this iconic sci-fi classic, the universe looms heavier than it did before.

Even as movies began suggesting that the biggest threat humanity faced was itself, the promise of life beyond our own planet became inextricable from military accomplishments. These were films that seemed to inject an anxiety into our progress by suggesting it was being motivated by conflict rather than the expansion of human consciousness through discovery. The introduction of the horror space subgenre in particular suggested that our conqueror’s mentality towards space would inevitably bring about our own downfall.

As the Americans and Russians were advancing their space programs, cinema reflected greater realism in their portrayal of zero gravity, technology and the surface of the moon. Just one year before the moon landing, with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick created the ultimate portrayal of space exploration, and in the process, inadvertently contributed to one of the most persistent conspiracy theories of the 20th century: that the Moon Landing was a hoax, and Kubrick directed the footage of Armstrong planting the American flag on the rocky surface of the moon.

In the aftermath of several lunar landings and further cosmic travel, the moon and outer space remain entrenched in the realm of imagination. The fact that there are still segments of the population committed to believing Kubrick directed the moon landing speaks more to how distant the promise of space exploration is rather than the likelihood of some vast government conspiracy. To many, the fictional world of Kubrick was more credible than the reality of grainy dust and rock. Our imagination has run so rampant that the landscape of cinema seems more believable than the real world.

Our more modern fascination with stories about space exploration, in films like Gravity (2013) and now, Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018), speaks more to an unsatiated curiosity for representations of human ingenuity and survival rather than paranoia over inevitable doom. Yet, these portrayals, too, are torn between promise and reality. The moon landing, rather than expanding our universe seems to have grounded it, at least in terms of cinema. The early dreams of space travel were fantastical, the current seem rooted to realistic possibilities of technology.

The Jetsons (1962-1963) promised that we’d all have little space houses and sassy robot maids. These ambitions have long faded, but so, too, has the idea that the great majority of us will ever know life beyond earth despite space travel being more accessible than ever before. Perhaps, part of our disillusionment with the current potential for traveling to space is that it’s tied to the cynicism with which it was portrayed in the past. Remember the mockery that Donald Trump received when he introduced his plan to create a space force?

If we are entering a new era of celestial navigation, it seems inevitable to many of us that it will be another way for corporations and governments to further avoid the catastrophic problems facing our own planet. The early promise of space exploration, a fantasy akin to wanting to explore the Land of Oz, was initially lost to the prevailing influence of military tensions. Now, the assurance of travel to outer space is increasingly tinged with the uncertainty of the future habitability of earth. The dream of space exploration that seemed inextricably linked to ideals rooted in discovery and advancement, feels more and more like an escape.

Given that cinema’s primary function has always been a form of escape for its audiences, maybe depictions of space is its most natural genre.