Wiggly Socks Movie Reviews

Three adventurous flyboys decide to join the human curiosity to see the moon, and fly over it, and sneak up to the Apollo 11 with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin to get there.

The three represent the usual teenage trio: Scooter is smart, IQ, intelligent geek and Nat is nice fat boy. Far from being unique, they look and behave like a version of Alvin and the Chipmunks. It is Scooter who, having listened to his grandpa’s talk about fun, particularly about his effort to save Amelia Earhart's plane during a flight to Europe, decides to take action and get to the Moon. The other two follow. They live near Cape Kennedy, Florida and while they present a housefly’s point of view of the mission, they are still just the wallflowers in their high school lives.

Their trip suffers unexpected complication from the USSR based flies that do not want the US ones landing safe or beating the Russian to the Moon adventure.

This is definitively a 3D movie, the architecture and animation is truly beautiful. At the very beginning a dragonfly will come as close to you as if it were to land in your palm. Beautifully rendered, nearly transparent wonder of nature.

The moments at Houston center are very well presented and the entire journey to the Moon, the touching of the planet and seeing the wonders of it, is truly touching. In that sense the film fulfilled its mission to bring part of the history alive for the generations that were not around when this astounding moment took place.

Nearly as nice, and very human, are the portrayals of the flies life, families (all the dad’s are absent) dwellings, feelings and desires. The rosy maggots are merrily playing, comically childish while the moms worry. The other part of the message is rather too obviously: be all you can be.

The film fails at the attempts of historical irony of the cold war, and their representative. Either from lack of knowledge, or from inability to combine a story that primarily aims at kids with ironical touches, it became flat pancake of clichés and absurdly overdone comics’ like characters. As this is forced on the story of the three fly-boys, it takes a lot away from the film. It would have been substantially better to employ Russian actors for the appropriate voice over. As it is, it is laid on way too thick in all senses. I expect it did not dawn onto the filmmakers that the most sardonic moment occurs when it takes a Russian to defeat one. Well, perhaps not the most sardonic one, considering what the Russian Bear is up to these days.

The dialogs are wooden, either preachy or shallow, and oddly enough the majority of the American fly crowd has dark skin, although the heroes are rather light.

Still, kids will love it and adults will be touched by the heroism of first human beings on the Moon.

There is now a visual depth, precision and quality of the picture in 3 D that makes the audience to try to touch objects that come, seemingly, right up to them. This is no longer a passing Hollywood fad; this became something the studios take very seriously indeed. And writer Domonic Paris has a new film already in production. Fly Me to the Moon was made by Belgian animation company nWave, which has specialized in 3-D films for IMAX theaters and theme parks. It is the director’s, and the nWave's founder, Ben Stassen’s, first feature film, and he says that the movie is the first animated feature created and released exclusively for 3-D.

For those who complain that there are no meaningful female parts: life was like that in 1969, and let’s not forgets this year’s Megan Daum and Pat Morison’s published fury at the “unnatural” ambition of young Hilary Clinton who offended them by wishing, when still in school, to become an astronaut. That wish made the Senator unfit to become a president for these women, and many of their readers.

Original song by Frank Sinatra; how is that for trip down the memory lane?

Directed by Ben Stassen. With Tim Curry, Robert Patrick, Kelly Ripa, Nicollette Sheridan, Ed Begley Jr. and Adrienne Barbeau.