Movies

The 3D adventure Fly Me to the Moon imagines an alternate history in which three adolescent houseflies stow away aboard Apollo 11, unintentionally thwarting the underdramatized space ambitions of a thuggish conglomerate of Russian flies. Alluding to but never showing us the eyes on the back of its characters' heads, and with Christopher Lloyd's grandpa appearing as if he were modeled after Willem Dafoe instead of Jeff Goldblum (or—you know—an actual housefly!), this sketchily conceived and executed space yarn is one missed opportunity after another. As the 3D genre necessitates, whole patches of the film hinge on pointy objects popping off the screen and threatening ocular protrusion, but aside from Neil Armstrong landing on the lunar surface and awestruck fly-boy Scooter (David Gore) witnessing the totemic event from inside the man's helmet, there's nothing inventive about the film's perspective of the world and the space above our heads. The be-all-that-you-can-be message is sweet, as is the way its main characters are written as secret saviors of the Apollo 11 mission, but the characterizations and details are derivative, with Scooter and his buddies I.Q. (Philip Bolden) and Nat (Trevor Gagnon) more than suggesting Alvin and the Chipmunks. These flies are meant to be one of a kind but they're just pop-culture magpies.