Lucy in the Sky has bombed at the US box office – why do some space films fail to take off?

Early on in the new film Lucy in the Sky, astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) is shown floating in space, looking down at the world below. From her vantage point, planet Earth looks very small and puny. She doesn’t want her time in the heavens to end. She has never felt so alive.

Back in the real world of school runs, office politicking and domestic drudgery, the astronaut feels both depressed and disoriented. The trip to space, she later recalls, was the best time in her life.

But in spite of a cast that includes Portman, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm as Lucy’s arrogant lover and Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, as her naively trusting Nasa publicist husband, Lucy in the Sky has crashed and burned at the US box office. The reviews have been negative: “F***ing dreadful”, “a collision of misguided aesthetics and rotten screenwriting”, and “It’s hard to know why anyone thought it would make a good movie” are some of the opinions among US critics, while The Independent, who gave it two stars, says director Noah Hawley “often drowns his star in unnecessary visual trickery”.

It is, however, the type of film that might, in the long run, assume minor cult status. Portman gives an intriguingly abrasive performance as the astronaut who can’t stand life on Earth. She’s a very blue-collar, Norma Rae Webster-like spacewoman, always ready to call out her bosses and trample over the feelings of her colleagues. She doesn’t care what anybody thinks about her, one reason why audiences might not warm to her.

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Also co-writer, Hawley turns the conventions of the typical space movie on its head. He starts the story just as Lucy’s one and only space mission is ending. For a change, the film, which is produced and shot by women, takes the perspective of the female characters. It exposes the chauvinism and braggadocio of the space cowboys and Nasa administrators behind their desks, who are usually portrayed in such a heroic light. Even so, this film is only the latest in a very long line of galactic misfires.

We’ve actually been living through a golden age of space movies. From Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013) to James Gray’s Ad Astra (2019) via Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) and Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018), cinemagoers have been treated to several spectacular, intellectually stimulating space voyages on screen, most of which have combined startling cinematography with very strong characterisation and performances. The leaps in visual effects enabled filmmakers to boldly go where no earlier space movies had gone before. Alongside the dramatic feature films, documentaries such as Apollo 19 and The Last Man on the Moon have also won awards and broken new ground.

It wasn’t always like this. If you look at the history of the genre and you remove an undisputed masterpiece like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) from the reckoning, you encounter a strange mishmash of half-baked B movies and eccentric auteur offerings.

Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) sets the tone. This was an inventive piece of fantasy from the French magician/silent movie pioneer, full of gesticulating astronomers, who look like wizards on leave from Hogwarts. Its space travellers dress like 19th-century dandies in frock coats. They have top hats and parasols. When their phallic-looking little space ship is launched by a troupe of bonnet-wearing bathing girls with bugles and flags, it shoots up in the air and eventually plops in the very creamy and human-looking face of the moon. Out of their vessel, the gesticulating gentlemen clamber, as if they’re on a trip to have a picnic in a far-flung corner of Paris. They bumble around the lunar surface, eventually ending up in an underground kingdom full of giant mushrooms and hostile aliens in skeleton-patterned leotards. The film is a strange mix of whimsy, fantasy and eroticism, a very long way removed from space missions as seen from the Mission Control Centre in Houston.

A Trip to the Moon has an eccentricity and charm that the majority of the space movies made over the past 120 years have completely lacked. Its basic storyline, though, has been copied many times. Since Melies’, we’ve had dozens of other films in which intrepid explorers have come across unlikely antagonists far out in space.

For example, in the Finnish-directed, German-backed, crowd-funded Europudding Iron Sky (2012), astronauts encounter Nazis who’ve escaped Earth and set up a “Fourth Reich” on the moon. The sequel, Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019), again featured Nazis on the moon as well as Steve Jobs, Margaret Thatcher, and Adolf Hitler riding a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Space movies in the 1950s were used as a convenient genre for looking at any issue that happened to be a source of public anxiety at the time, whether juvenile delinquency or the “red menace”. Clean-living Americans who ventured into the ether were always in danger of encountering alien life forms.

In Arthur Hilton’s Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), the filmmakers announce, in the opening voice-over, that they’re pondering “the eternal wonders of space and time, the far-away dreams and mysteries of other worlds”. In fact, as it becomes apparent once the travellers arrive on the moon, their real concern is gender relations. The moon is inhabited by a female community that can “project their thoughts long-distance” and knows all about celestial navigation. Like the aliens in A Trip to the Moon, they wear catsuit-like leotards.

“We have no use for men,” they proclaim to Helen Salinger (Marie Windsor), the one female member of the crew from Earth who has just landed. The cat-women, living in their all-female society, are portrayed in a resolutely negative way. The male astronauts are very intimidated by the idea of them in charge and do everything they can to stop them from taking over their space ship and coming to Earth.

Amid all the creaky, low-budget galactic adventures with dubious special effects and reactionary storylines made in post-war Hollywood, one or two space films were genuinely original and inventive. Forbidden Planet (1956) re-imagined Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space, starring Walter Pidgeon as the Prospero-like magus living on a distant planet and featuring a robot that goes through moral agonies and short circuits whenever asked to do anything evil.

However, these were exceptions. Lists of the worst films of all time always generally comprise plenty of space movies. One title always mentioned is Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), which fans and critics alike cherish for its atrociousness. “So very bad that it exerts a strange fascination,” one detractor/admirer wrote of it. “It appears to have been made in somebody’s garage.”

Plan 9 isn’t about humans going to outer space. It’s about “unspeakable horrors” from outer space “paralysing the living and resurrecting the dead”, as the slogans on its poster proclaimed.

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If not entirely forgotten, the film was relatively little-seen before the Medved brothers’ book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) gave it the Grand Prize: Sweepstakes award as the People’s Choice for the worst film of all time. In the same book, the Medveds also named Wood as Life Achievement Award winner as The Worst Director of all Time. This double dishonour was both absurdly unfair and ultimately to the director’s advantage. Wood was a small-timer, working with very limited means but who had a certain crackpot idealism. There was something touching about his portentousness. “We are all interested in the future, For that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives,” is how the narrator of Plan 9, the real-life psychic Criswell, introduces Plan 9 which, inventively and prophetically (given the later reviews), has its credits written out on gravestones.

Wood’s cult status was bolstered by all the attention. Tim Burton later made an affectionate, award-winning biopic about him, Ed Wood (1994), in which he was played by Johnny Depp and in which Martin Landau co-starred as Bela Lugosi. Wood, who died in 1978, achieved a level of posthumous celebrity that put most of even the greatest Hollywood directors to shame.

Lucy in the Sky is a prestige project with big-name stars. Produced by Fox Searchlight, it is being released in the UK by Disney. There is little chance of audiences laughing at it affectionately in the way they might have done if it had humbler origins or more of a sense of irony. It is not Teenagers in Space or Cat-Women of the Moon. It wasn’t made on the hoof by some Ed Wood-like chancer. It’s a serious, self-conscious affair that demands to be taken seriously – and so isn’t much fun.

Not that it is the only recent galactic misfire. Passengers (2016), the torpid would-be blockbuster featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt on a 120-year voyage on a space ship, was as dull a movie as its two normally charismatic stars have ever appeared in. The Wachowskis’s Jupiter Ascending (2015) was an exercise in high kitsch with very silly plotting. Claire Denis’ High Life (2018), starring Juliette Binoche, had an alienating streak of extreme pretentiousness about it.

Lucy in the Sky is no worse than either of these. Its misfortune, though, is to follow in the wake of so many other original and breathtaking space movies. Against such competition, it is becoming harder and harder to achieve lift-off.

In the age of Interstellar and Gravity, the Ed Wood-type, B movie-style idiosyncrasy no longer cuts it. Even the biggest-budgeted movies with the best-known stars will burn up at the box office unless their scripts are as tightly constructed and original as their visual effects are spectacular.

Lucy in the Sky is released in the UK today (Friday 6 December)