Humanity’s interest in the moon has never really wavered. This year’s Artemis II mission has proved that we’re still just as fascinated by space travel and exploration as we’ve ever been, and cinema has always been there along the way to help us imagine not just what it’s like to lift off into space, but the weirdness and isolation of actually being there.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Let’s take a look at some of the best moon movies ever made (and some that are so bad they’re good) as we travel to the moon and back.MoonSam Rockwell dominates the screen in Duncan Jones’s directorial debut, Moon. It’s a showcase for the beloved yet still underrated actor, playing several versions of a miner working on the far side of the moon who, after three years of a solitary lunar shift, starts to question his reality. Featuring a haunting score by Clint Mansell, Moon is minimalist but atmospheric, and the answer to the slow-burning mystery surrounding Sam’s true nature lingers long after the credits roll, showing you can still make an enduring sci-fi movie on a low budget.Apollo 13Docudrama Apollo 13 features a stacked cast, with Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, the late Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris and Kathleen Quinlan all on top form. The movie follows the Apollo 13 astronauts, who suffer an explosion on board their ship during a mission to the moon. On the ground, NASA has to find a way to bring the astronauts back safely. Ron Howard’s 1995 flick boasts impressive technical accuracy as it intercuts the action with actual news footage from the incident to recreate a powerful moment from the past in painstaking detail.MoontrapCult movie Moontrap is pure pulp of the best kind, as Star Trek’s Walter Koenig and Bruce “Evil Dead” Campbell team up for a search-and-destroy moon mission to take out some killer cyborg alien…things. The details aren’t important. What’s important is that Moontrap is unapologetic, campy 80s sci-fi with neat practical effects and fun creature designs. It ticks along at a great pace until its 92 minutes are up, at which point you’ll wonder if it has a sequel. It does, and about twelve people have seen it; you could be lucky number 13!First ManLong before Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling went to space as Neil Armstrong in this thoughtful biopic that charts the years leading up to the Apollo 11 mission. First Man isn’t too interested in flashy sequences, preferring to linger on the isolation and psychological cost of being an astronaut during a dangerous time for space exploration, and Gosling puts in a restrained performance leading up to an unforgettably emotional scene on the surface of the moon. The movie might not have had the impact of Damien Chazelle’s other acclaimed movies, like La La Land and Whiplash, but it’s largely successful in telling Armstrong’s story from a new perspective.OutlandPeter Hyams had already directed Capricorn One (an almost-moon movie) when he took on Outland, a gritty sci-fi thriller about a federal marshal (Sean Connery) trying to control mining colony chaos on the Jovian moon of Io (why restrict this list to Earth’s moon when there are so many more moons available?!) There’s some strong worldbuilding in this noirish tale, which follows Connery’s marshal as he begins to investigate some strange deaths with the help of the colony’s ballbusting doctor (Frances Sternhagen). It’s High Noon on Jupiter’s moon—what’s not to love?A Trip to the MoonA Trip to the Moon, or Le Voyage dans la Lune if you prefer (merci beaucoup) was the original moon movie. Director Georges Méliès was moved to make it after reading Jules Verne’s novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, and in his short, silent film, we track a group of plucky astronomers who fly right into the moon’s eye like a big pizza pie, only to discover a group of underground lunar aliens who don’t take too kindly to the interruption. Boasting innovative early special effects, the film’s whimsical ideas of space travel might seem a bit silly now, but they understood, on some level, that the sci-fi genre was going to be big, even if it took a while to properly catch on.AvatarProbably the biggest, most ambitious, and most expensive movie on this list, Avatar is the franchise that just won’t die, and it all started with James Cameron’s first movie about the habitable moon of Pandora and a very human threat to one of its local tribes, the Na’vi. When veteran Jake Sully is recruited to explore Pandora in a Na’vi-human hybrid body (the titular avatar) things go unexpectedly sideways for the human forces who are determined to mine the moon for its rare unobtanium mineral—they simply did not foresee Sully falling in love with a local, and that’s on them.Destination MoonIt was a long time before cinema began to imagine what a real trip to the moon might be like, but in 1950, with the help of author Robert A. Heinlein and magnificent Technicolor, Destination Moon told the story of a group of American industrialists who had to privately fund and build a rocket to reach the moon, effectively bypassing government hand-wringing and bureaucracy. In the 21st century, the movie feels oddly prescient as private aerospace firms take the lead in developing rockets and space systems, with NASA and the U.S. government increasingly dependent on them.Fly Me to the MoonIf you’re looking for something a little different, Apple’s historical rom-com Fly Me to the Moon is a pleasant love letter to NASA featuring two bankable, charming stars. In the most recent film on this list, marketing whizz Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) and NASA launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) wrestle with the idea of falsifying an Apollo 11 moon landing just in case the real one goes horribly wrong. MoonfallLook, not every sci-fi movie needs to be realistic, or even good! Sometimes you’re just in the mood for some absolute nonsense, and who better positioned to deliver some absolute nonsense than the man behind Independence Day and 2012? In Roland Emmerich’s box office flop Moonfall, two astronauts and a conspiracy theorist discover some weird shenanigans going on with the moon when it drifts out of orbit. To say any more about the plot (such as it is) would spoil some truly ludicrous twists and turns, but this cheesy B-movie is definitely worth a watch if your standards aren’t too high and you just want to watch some good old-fashioned CGI disaster scenes.The post From Méliès to Apollo 13: The Best Moon Movies appeared first on Den of Geek.