‘Fly Me to the Moon’: Bring aspirin, not bug spray, to 3D animated kid-flick

Published 2:19 pm Thursday, August 14, 2008

Who hasn’t wondered about being a fly on the wall at various historical events? The makers of “Fly Me to the Moon” have taken this literally: Their heroes, three house flies, tag along on Apollo 11’s flight to the moon.

Right away, I sense your skepticism. Who made the little insect space suits, for instance?

But come on. The flies already talk. What’s a little suspension of disbelief in a cartoon, anyway?

The three young flies, who live in a bog in Cape Canaveral, are inspired by the adventurous anecdotes of a talkative grandpa (voiced by Christopher Lloyd). So they buzz on up to the launching pad on the day of liftoff, and sneak into the capsule along with astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.

Yes, they have their little fly space suits. Stop asking about that.

Director Ben Stassen and his crew aren’t concerned about such things — there wasn’t really bug spray in the Apollo 11 cockpit. Their goal is to string together a few kid-friendly gags along with a genial sense of wonder about the space flight.

And, perhaps most importantly, to showcase 3D. Yes, this is another in the recent rash of 3D pictures, with glasses required and depth of field assumed.

I still think “Beowulf” had the best 3D effects of this batch. Maybe I was sitting in a bad seat, but I had a headache after watching “Fly Me to the Moon.” Every time my vision got comfortable with a three-dimensional shot, there’d be a cut to a sudden close-up of something and my eyes would cross. (You do not want to sit close to the screen at this one.)

Still, there were moments when the 3D was breathtaking, like the shot that glides through the swampy home of the flies. And some of the space stuff was great — you could get a tingly feeling of what some things must have actually looked like up there, in depth.

Even if the 3D were flawless, the movie is weak in another important department: the script. It bops around for a while before settling into the flight, and the three flies are the most conventional types possible: the hero, the brain, and the overeater. A few celebrity voices — among them Tim Curry and Kelly Ripa — don’t add much.

The real Buzz Aldrin contributes a cameo to the film, and assures us that there weren’t really flies onboard the Apollo 11 flight. And so the movie crashes to Earth — which, in 3D, is quite a crash.