User Reviews

SPOILERS - DON'T READ IF YOU INTEND TO WATCH IT

Before watching it I didn't know what exactly it was; opinions seemed to differ. But having watched it, I'd say this documentary is also a good test of how easily you can be fooled into believing anything you told that seems logical on the surface.

Right from the start I couldn't believe what I was hearing from the narrator. That the Apollo program was to become Star Wars. That the moon landing was to cover up a money laundry agenda with funds going missing. That the public really needed some warm up with the help of Hollywood to greet the moon landing with enthusiasm. That NASA used lots of ideas from 2001 Odyssey. That Hollywood changed the spacesuits, changed the rocket, they even moved the launch pad to get better shot angle. By any stretch of imagination this was just a line of stupid suggestion, however convincingly told.

Then come these interviews with top US officials who never mention the subject they are discussing, not a single word from the four people in the room about the Moon, or any names dropped, let alone mentioning faking the landing in a studio. That's why you don't hear the questions from the interviewer. You film a conversation on one subject and then use the words to make it look like they talk about another. You can then insert these bits of the interview into any narrative you want. They might as well all be talking about their fishing trips or some covert op in Korea in the 50's or a movie they watched.

END OF SPOILERS

Oh, boy, they really did take the Mickey out of those Moon-hoax Kubrick-did-it-all theorists. Nice effort. Particularly was important to have Kubrick's wife on the screen. She must be tired of all this moon-hoax rubbish herself. Oh, and you do have to watch the film right through to the end of the credits.

On a side note to those Moon-hoax believers. You really need to get out of the box and look at the bigger picture, and most importantly read about space exploration history. And here's freebie for you to get you going. If you know anything about the Russian space program of the 60's and the Moon race that Soviet Union was part of you must have heard of Alexei Leonov - the first person to walk in outer space back in March 1965. He was soon made the lead cosmonaut of a group of cosmonauts that were scheduled to walk on the Moon.

When the Americans first walked on the Moon in July 1969, the Soviet deep space receiving station at Eupatoria (on the Black Sea) was receiving all transmissions from those Apollo flights including the surface of the Moon and they were specialists and they knew for a fact these were coming from the Moon and not Hollywood, California via some remote satellite. When the whole world was watching those live TV images from the Moon only two countries in the world were not televising them - Soviet Union and China. And so Alexei Leonov with other cosmonauts were sitting in a locked room in Ostankino television centre, Moscow, watching those live picture coming from the Moon surface as it was the only place where they could. Leonov, a smart man, trust me, confirmed it in his interviews and If there was even a shade of doubt this wasn't for real the Soviets would be the first to expose it as they would be the most interested party in it.

And one the final note. When some years from now, and that time will come for sure, when astronauts land on the moon again, and we will see a flag waving again in 1/6 of Earth gravity and in zero air resistance where inertia is a lot higher than that on Earth, these moon-hoax theory supporters will feel incredibly stupid. Definitely worth watching.

A splendid, intelligent and very funny manipulation of the audience (at least this single piece of audience. ;-] ) I will to mention the plot and just applaud the way the film messes with ones feelings. It reminds me of the excellent Belgian pseudo-documentary "C'est arrivé près de chez vous" (1992) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103905/ which also made the viewer doubt his or her own judgement.

What bothers me about this form is that facts are mixed with fiction so that you are left without a clue about which pieces of information to believe. But I guess that's a major point of the project...

By the way, what an impressive list of interview victims (Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Haig, Kubricks widow etc. How did the director get these people to cooperate? Are we talking about a subtle counter-hoax from the White House to cover up the original conspiration and make it impossible to put forward this original conspiration theory in the future? ;-) The conspiration continues ...

If you feel angry or confused after watching it, that's good. That's the point, IMHO. I would give it 15 out of 10 if it was possible.

I didn't know what it really was about. And I missed the first few minutes, so I don't even know if German ARTE channel put any comment to this documentary as they aired it for the first time. I was totally unprepared for the shock.

I've always thought I'm a skeptic and hard to impress. Even more, few days before I've had a look at one of those "Moonlanding-was-a-fake" discussions, and knowing enough about astronomy, physics and photography, I was able to discredit most of the arguments right away. But... jeez, they had Haig and Rumsfeld and Armstrong... saying things that made my whole world fall apart. Actually, my world fell apart twice this evening. First time as I started to believe in this incredible conspiracy, second time after the credits, as I realized how easily I threw away all my reason and knowledge because of EXPERTS saying I was wrong. I remember being so fooled, that for a while I refused to believe in what they were showing in the credit part!

Rewatching the documentary I just could't believe I've bought the whole story! If you know, you can clearly see how it is built, starting with innocent details.

Karel does a very smart thing at the beginning. He is not stating that the landing was fake but that it could not be filmed. By doing this he avoids the film's idea being negated right away by those who do "believe" in the moonlanding. Instead he breaks in through a back door, and once the viewer starts to ask himself if it COULD MAYBE make sense he swallows the hook. The rest is psychology. When the story is getting more and more obscure and ridiculous toward the end, the audience is brainwashed enough to believe everything.

In the truth all those experts' statements are nothing more than meaningless pieces cut out of context. Karel could talk about fox hunting with those people, what they really say contains not a single bit of information. Makes you wonder about history books and daily news... I couldn't watch ANYTHING in TV without suspicion for weeks after that.

I do agree with people saying the final message in the credits might not be clear enough. But I also can imagine it was done by purpose, and Karel is laughing his butt off while watching conspiracy theorists using his movie as an argument. If the film was meant as a sociological experiment it has fully succeeded.

I think it's a shame that Dark Side of The Moon was never released on DVD, together with comments and some additional information. I would like to know which parts are true (at least what Karel THINKS is true), without doing a huge research by myself. Kubrick getting that Zeiss lens from NASA seems to be true -> http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.bl.html

IMHO watching this film should be obligatory in every school -- for me it was the most valuable lesson I ever learned from TV.

I have no doubts that media are using the same manipulation techniques every day. I know that Michael Moore did it at least once in "Bowling for Columbine", but without giving us any hint in the final credits. Which I think is sad, because many people are using Moore's movies as arguments too, and he is much more popular than Karel.

In a time of computer effects only our common sense and our knowledge about the world make us able to distinguish between fiction and reality. But what do we know about reality? Mostly we just rely on second hand information, taking things for true because we are told they are true. One could check the sources, research arguments, try to look under the surface... but in the end all we get is someone's statement that can be manipulated or pictures that can be fake... or did you ever see with your own eyes that the Earth is round? :P

Yes, Dark Side of the Moon IS scary, much more scary than Matrix.

We choose to go to the Moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

With these historical words of the late JFK, the race to the moon was officially started.

Almost seven years later, this race was decided when the whole world witnessed how Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on another world. But was everything really the way it looked?

This documentary starts from a simple premise: when Stanley Kubrick wanted to shoot the candle light scenes for Barry Lyndon, he needed a special lens that costs several millions of dollars and only one such lens existed and was owned by NASA, and they used it for tracking satellites in complete darkness.

The ease with which the NASA was ready to borrow this piece of espionage equipment to Kubrick set the researcher on a hunt for the truth behind the moon landing and the part that Kubrick had played in it. Exposing fact after fact, the director William Karel explains the viewer how the evidence that was right there all along under our noses proves that the moon landing was actually staged in a studio and that the original plan of Nixon, who was president at that time, was to make everyone who participated in this staging, disappear. He shows testimonies of Buzz Aldrin, Richard Nixon, Stanley Kubrick, Henry Kissinger and even Donald Rumsfeld to prove his theory.

****MAJOR SPOILER**** If you want to enjoy this documentary to fullest, then please watch it first before you read on.

OK you are either stubborn or you have watched it already. The topic is of course not very original, the movie Capricorn One already covered a staged Mars landing, and there is a lot of literature that tries to prove that the NASA moon landing happened in the studio. And this one is of course a mockumentary but the clever thing about it is that it gradually feeds the viewer with inconsistencies and absurdities which get more and more noticeable as the story unfolds. It starts with subtle things like a view of an ordinary 28-85mm Carl Zeiss lens costing less than 1000$, a French speaking head of the CIA and a mission control team member named David Bowman ending in such ridiculous claims that in order to eliminate the 4 remaining witnesses, an army force far greater than that used in the first Gulf war was deployed. And for the intellectually challenged viewer, at the end some bloopers are shown between the end credits that show that certain parts were played by actors.

Still, by using a clever mix of real footage, excepts of interviews with famous people and fake interviews with fictional key figures played by actors, Karel manages to keep many less informed viewers unaware for a while that they are watching a hoax.

And depending on how keen and sceptical you are, the time for you to expose this hoax will be shorter. And once you realize that you were being fooled, it suddenly turns into a very funny joke. Even if you decided to read the spoiler, you will still be entertained by the absurdities near the end.

**** END SPOILER ****

I advise you to watch it with a few friends and I am certain that you will equally enjoy their reactions as much as you will enjoy this documentary. It is certainly worth a second view in order to capture all the details.

Some of the comments here just prove precisely what the director was trying to say.

One of the reasons the show was so good was that it wasn't obvious it was a "mockumentary" until you were well and truly in it. The director just kept sliding up the "mock volume" throughout the entire show. Basically, when all your friends are around and talk about it, you say something like "hey, when did you figure it out?" and one person will say, "I was sucked in. I didn't figure it out until the (obviously American) CIA troops went in under cover and left McDonalds wrappers floating about - about two thirds in", and someone else says they didn't get it till close to then end. Someone else says they sussed it out very early on.

But the point is, they all get it sometime. The director keeps hamming it up until he finally goes obvious towards the end. And if you still don't get it, then you probably believe in Santa Claus!!

I will say, however, that I can understand English-as-a-second-language-ers not "getting" it because it plays a lot on language cues for satire and they may not be so obvious to someone not fluent in English. I think a lot of the 1/10 people are in this category.

One of the best TV shows I've ever seen. 10/10 easily. The only other show that scores 10/10 for me was the TV series The Singing Detective. Somewhat different, mind.

Remember seeing this on TV a few years back. Look, I study history and believe myself to be skeptical and not easy to fool, but this "documentary" had me fooled big time. OK, I mean, we all want to believe the conspiracy theories a little bit, don't we? :-) What fooled was that they got Kissinger and all the big shots to take part in the production. But i really hate myself for being fooled.. if it was all true, wouldn't we have read about it in the papers and seen it on the news before the programme aired??

Anyway, this would be excellent to show younger students and people who just buy into any conspiracy theories.

I will definitely be trying to get it somehow. Please mention similar productions if you know any :-)

-Uffe Steenberg (Denmark)

The mockumentary The Dark side of the Moon was first screened by SBS TV in Australia on April 1, 2003. And yes, some of the segments were over-the-top, but I think this was done deliberately to discredit the Moon landing hoax. Unfortunately, despite the added clue of the screening date here, many people still believed it was a real revelation that the Moon landing had been faked. Although I fully share sarastro7's lament that there are so many people who do not believe the Moon landings really happened, and I agree that it is a pity that the documentary gave credence to the conspiracy peddlers, I still think it is an exceptionally clever production. The fact that viewers found it hard to sort out the facts from the fabrications, indeed even wonder if it was a US government counter-hoax, underscores William Karel's point. I only saw it once, but as I understand it, the non-actor interviewees, including Donald Rumsfeld, were not actually part of the farce. If viewers listen carefully, the real key players interviewed do not refer specifically to the Apollo 11 mission in their comments denying it happened. Rather, the documentary maker inserted clips of real interviews with these personages, but in most cases they were speaking about unrelated matters. The viewer merely draws inference from the words and clips from the context of the documentary. The key players were then asked for their consent to include the clips, and the end segment captures their surprised reaction.

Amusing, to say the least. Very convincing in the beginning, rather ludicrous towards the end. Contrary to popular belief this documentary does not state that the USA never went to the moon. It merely hints at the possibility that the pictures the world saw in 1969 were in fact staged. The documentary makes fun at the lunar hoax-theory, and cleverly, as mentioned before by someone else on this board, it could very well be a contra lunar hoax theory by the Government of the USA. What makes this documentary really stand out is the fact that top ranked officials speak uncandidly on camera. The viewer is left wondering why serious politicians would collaborate with a French documentary on a conspiracy theory? Maybe there is more to this documentary than the fact that it is meant to make fun of the lunar hoax theory. All in all, very entertaining.

When i first saw this documentary I was appalled - i was very angry with the American government (under Richard Nixon). In popular culture it is many times suggested that the Americans faked the lunar-missions. Many people believed that the Apollo-missions were filmed in a studio in area 51. And when i saw this documentary i was fully convinced. In the doc Kubricks widow Christiana Kubrick, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Alexander Haig, Richard Helms, Henry Kissinger and even Donald Rumsfeld all admit more or less that the moon-landings were a hoax. But when saw it a second time I wasn't so sure about the doc was a real doc or not. In the end of the doc - when the credits are shown - we are shown outtakes of the doc. In the outtakes there are scenes were you easy can see that the people are not taking this seriously. There is one scene were Donald Rumsfeld laughs and ask the film crew: "I thought you were a real documentary". And it is also revealed that many of the men, who in the documentary are portrayed as experts and witnesses, are in fact actors. The truth came to me a year or two later, when I in a science magazine read that the documentary was made merely to show how easy it is to manipulate and fool people to think certain things.

I once also believed that the Americans did not land on the moon.

Partly because of this documentary.

Much footage from the moon can very well be fake. That is because the could not film there, supposedly, because there was too hot and too cold.

And then there is the thing about the wind on the flag.....

But then there is the big problem: The Astronauts took home hundreds of kilos of rocks from the moon - KILOS. And the rocks ARE FROM THE MOON. The rocks have been spread around the world to all countries to further science. And there are for a fact from the moon, all laboratories from around the world has confirmed it: The isotopes of the basic elements of the rock could never have come from earth - only the moon.

How do all you crack-put-theorists explain that?

How come that many professors and astronomers from around all believe that USA did go to the moon??? Can you explain that (the only ones who disbelieve all this are all out off a job, and needs money)

At first when I heard that I was enraged. I was angry that the doc fooled me so easily. But when i cooled down I began to think. This is a very good doc to show to people and then tell them later it is a hoax. Because then they will learn not to trust everything they hear. The doc is very good made - and everyone deserves to see

This movie serves as a classic ploy to "poison the well" of information ( though it may not have been created for that purpose, this does explain the peculiar high-level cooperation... ) questioning whether NASA successfully landed on the moon or merely orbited Earth and faked the rest. This question won't go away until NASA releases proof of the lunar missions, which they have not only not done - they in fact have behaved in a most guilty manner by covering up and hiding and recently "losing" audio tapes of the missions.... as well as the boast by ESA that they would end the controversial questions by releasing new images of the landing site of Apollo:

esamultimedia.esa.int/images/smart_1/1888_40L_Hi.jpg

...guess that ends that, eh? You do SEE the landing site, don't you?.... hello?..... ESA?.... NASA?... Hubble telescope? Can someone simply point a large telescope at the moon and snap a few photos showing some residue of the Apollo missions? Ask yourself WHY hasn't this simple action occurred in nearly 40 years hence? After all - there's a lunar rover parked up there somewhere, right? ... tire tracks all over the place, left-behind equipment...

Imagine how simple it would be for NASA to put this all to rest for good... it really makes you wonder....

The technique used by intelligence agency disinformation pros is called "poison well": ... adding a little false information among factual information.... later the planted inaccuracy is pointed to, the "conspiracy theorists" ridiculed, and for most of the huddled masses this instantly "de-bunks" the entire subject. This tendency results from "cognitive dissonance" and of course from most people's mistaken belief that the corporate news media is telling the truth.... which they are most definitely NOT doing.

NASA cancels book rebutting moon hoax: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/ 2424927.stm

NASA rebuttal of the alleged 'hoax": liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/News/2001/News- MoonLanding.asp ... having first watched "Operation Lune"... ( "Dark Side of the Moon" - video.google.com/videoplay? docid=3288261061829859642&q ) ...is this de-bunking satisfactory? It may seem to be a first glance, but are you truly thinking? Or are you being told what to think? Most importantly as always: what is being left out?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_accusations

xenophilia.com/zb0003.htm

Moon rocks: the alleged existence of 842 lbs. of moon rocks seems to be a sacred piece of information that few challenge. Is this "fact" beyond question? Are any of these "facts" beyond question? Is it wise to place ANYTHING "beyond question"?

Fake moon dust: science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/28dec_truefake.htm

( keep in mind that it doesn't require a MANNED mission to retrieve lunar rocks and dust ... )

NASA plans to return to the moon... perhaps by 2020... space.com/news/061204_nasa_moon.html

... they admit overcoming the damaging effects of gamma rays beyond the Van Allen Belt will be the greatest challenge...

Was light-weight foil enough to protect astronauts in 1969? How did they have enough fuel for the return trip? Where are the blueprints? Why did so many program insiders die a series of strange deaths afterwards? Why have all audio recordings disappeared? Why no picture showing the Lunar Rover on the moon in almost forty years? Why do the astronauts' photos look as if they were lit by huge spotlights in a studio? Why the tremendous secrecy in all aspects when a few strategic de-classified documents or a single Hubble photo could lay this whole thing to rest?

The existence of a cover-up is the most damming evidence of all...

I give this movie ten stars due to it's mind-expanding potential. I'd also ask each and every one of the readers to "think for yourself and question authority!".

* * * CAUTION the following comment may or may not contain SPOILERS * * *

Hahaha, never thought the man responsible for tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians (oops, collateral damage) could be so charming when being interviewed.

It's amazing that such a busy man as Rumsfeld could find the time to cooperate in this documentary.

Another person who seems so much more human after viewing this product, is of course Henry Kissinger.

Then there's some more big wigs who graciously gave their full support to this humorist documentary. Among them: Buzz Aldrin, Alexander Haig and Stanley Kubrick's widow.

I never heard of this documentary maker before but he must be reallyreally famous: why else would all these powerful and famous people willingly give their sparse free time to make this product the thing it has become?

I suppose I am more cynical than most but I'm still surprised anyone could be properly taken in by this film. I had my doubts from the very start but the jig was well and truly up after Neil Armstrong's bad jokes on the moon. I'll admit Kubrick is one of my favourite directors so I got the in jokes regarding the names Jack Torrance and David Bowman. Later on the documentary really enters into ridiculous territory!

Basically I think it's a clever idea which was impossible to expand into a lengthy documentary. I didn't find the hoodwinking funny, just pretentious. The filmmakers obviously enjoyed toying with less well informed viewers like a cat with a mouse. I found it boring