It's my own fault. I keep saying filmmakers launched astronauts into space long before NASA did — in 1902 in Georges Méliès' silent comedy A Trip to the Moon — so I can't blame my editors for asking for a cinematic take on the Artemis II mission.
But as soon as I started researching, I was in trouble. I'd look up a title, and before I could even finish typing, my browser would suggest a more interesting one. Say, if I typed in "moon," it would, based on my past searches, fill in the next letters it thought I was looking for, and up would pop 2016's Moonlight, the best picture Oscar winner.
Also Moonstruck (1987), in which Nicolas Cage falls for Cher, and gets literally struck — twice — by Cher before she tells him to "snap out of it."
At which point, I'd start film-clip-surfing, and in no time, I'd be watching another Oscar winner, Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon (1973) telling Ryan O'Neal's Moses that she didn't know what scruples are, "but if you've got 'em, you can sure bet they belong to somebody else."
All of this made me realize the motion picture academy seems to have a thing about moon movies. I watched Ethan Hawke, nominated for best actor in Blue Moon (2025), and Lily Gladstone, whose best actress nomination was one of ten that Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) didn't win.
And that sent me down a rabbit hole of directors who'd had a moon phase: Otto Preminger, with The Moon is Blue (1953), Franco Zeffirelli, with Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), Patricia Riggen, with her Sundance film Under the Same Moon (2007), Wes Anderson, with Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and Woody Allen, with Magic in the Moonlight (2014).
Is there something about the moon that brings resonance to a title? Shakespeare saw portents — the "inconstant moon" of Romeo and Juliet. Eugene O'Neill suggested lunar gravitation pulled tides of emotion in A Moon for the Misbegotten.
And in Tinseltown, it's all that plus romance. Especially musical romance, maybe because "moon" rhymes with "croon." These were big in the '40s and '50s: there was New Moon, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Shine On, Harvest Moon, a 1944 biopic of vaudeville star Nora Bayes, 1941's Moon Over Miami with Betty Grable, and then On Moonlight Bay starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in 1951, and its 1953 sequel By the Light of the Silvery Moon. Prince's directorial debut Under the Cherry Moon underwhelmed audiences more than 30 years later.
I learned that The Man in the Moon introduced 1991 audiences to a 14-year-old named Reese Witherspoon, while Man on the Moon brought them Jim Carrey as offbeat entertainer Andy Kaufman eight years later.
Paired with darker images, the word "moon" can conjure suspense — as in the Westerns Blood on the Moon (1948) with Robert Mitchum, and The Stalking Moon (1968) with Gregory Peck. Not to mention 007's Moonraker (1979), in which Roger Moore wraps things up by guiding a Bond villain into a space station airlock, and ejecting him with the words, "take a giant step for mankind."
Which brings me back to space travel, though I'm leaving out a lot of rabbit holes I went down: Marlon Brando embarrassing himself in Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Liza Minnelli cracking wise in Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), Edward breaking Bella's heart in The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009).
Each was a detour that turned into an eye-opening excursion, giving me a look at something I thought I knew, from an angle I'd not considered. Sort of an Artemis-inspired cinematic fly-by.
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