Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick; Part One: Kubrick and Apollo (2011)

Jay Weidner is a man with a lot of imagination. I like that, make no mistake. I love finding subtexts, I'm a strong believer in the entertainment value of certain conspiracy theories and pseudo-sciences. There's a reason why I'm always watching Ancient Aliens, UFO Hunters, Brad Meltzer's Decoded etc: because I love imagination and deconstruction of what most people take for granted. That doesn't mean I believe in it. I'm a born sceptic, an atheist since childhood and I see documentaries like Kubrick's Odyssey as entertainment, like a almost-real life Indiana Jones adventures but with lonely nerds trying to get some attention.

The 16th of October 2002 the French TV-channel Arte released (or should I say unleashed) William Karel's Opération Lune on an unsuspecting audience. It's a documentary that tells the truth about the Apollo 11 mission, that it was all staged by Stanley Kubrick on earth, including reliable witnesses (including Henry Kissinger and Kubrick's wife) and strong proof. There's just one fat problem: it's all a hoax, a clever and witty mockumentary. If you stay to the end of the production the proofs is getting more and more absurd and it's quite clear that everything is just made up - but I doubt Jay Weidner stayed that long. He was already searching the NASA homepage for high resolution photos, maybe calling his friends to see if any of them had any of Kubrick's movies on DVD or VHS (this was a few years ago, you know...). The result came last year with this highly speculative documentary that basically wants to prove three things:

1. Kubrick got hired by the US government to fake the moon landing-footage.

2. That he used Stephen King's novel The Shining to reveal this story.

3. He got killed because he wanted to tell media about this secret.

I'm not the one saying "No thank you, Sir" to speculative conspiracy docs, but I like to see some evidence. Some ambitions. What we have here is a few analysed photos in the beginning and then it's just Mr Weidner who speculates about what he sees in The Shining. And he sees a lot. He connects everything to the moon landing, from numbers to pieces of art. Jack and Danny is just two sides of Kubrick: the workaholic slave under the secret government moon landing project and the suffering artist. The room 237 represents the 237 000 miles there is to the moon, the Apollo 11 shirt that Danny is wearing is just not a coincidence and yada yada yada. I love stuff like this, but come on! You can read anything into everything! That's just lame.

But it's still fairly entertaining and fans, like, of moronic and badly researched conspiracy documentaries will have a field day with this. Can't wait until the other parts of Jay Wieder's Kubrick-project is released. I wonder what he will find in Barry Lyndon? Maybe a secret Masonic message about world domination? Who knows, but one thing is for sure: I'll be there and watch.