A marketing hotshot (Scarlett Johansson) teams up with NASA’s chief engineer (Channing Tatum) to save NASA in a rom-com that never quite escapes Earth’s atmosphere. Here’s our Fly Me To The Moon review.
There’s a perfectly lovely, Jerry Maguire-esque rom-com somewhere in Fly Me To The Moon.
For the first half hour or so, I thought I was watching it. Scarlett Johansson is a mischievous, scheming marketing guru, recruited by Woody Harrelson’s sleazy government big wig to improve the public’s cratering opinion of the Apollo programme. Channing Tatum is a grumpy NASA engineer who fixes leaky gas tanks with a broom. Their first encounter is a brilliantly soppy meet-cute in a diner. Thank you very much, two tickets for the chalk-and-cheese romance, please.
Then they faked the moon landing. The period rom-com of my dreams adjusted its trajectory and flew off into space in a particularly undignified tailspin. It never really recovered.
It’s just very hard to work out why they’ve done this. Woody Harrelson gives an explanation a good go – having spent this much money on Apollo 11, the government can’t afford for the mission to fail. Ergo, fake moon landing is prepared in a soundstage as a backup. Whatever happens on 20th July 1969, the world will see Armstrong and Aldrin plant a US flag on the lunar surface. They’ll believe America put a man on the moon.
Unless, of course, the mission does go wrong, and they spot the massive rocket exploding on the launch pad. Or someone asks what happened to the three astronauts who’ve spent the film up to this point being plastered on magazine covers and giving press conferences. Or they start to wonder why the massive rocket hasn’t come back.
I appreciate this makes me sound very boring. For the record, I think “the US faked the moon landing” is one of the more fun, less harmful conspiracy theories out in the world. I’ve no problem with making a film about faking the moon landing. That sounds fun! It’s still a bunch of insert-derogatory-term-for-genitalia-here, but if I had to pick one…
But Fly Me To The Moon doesn’t just try and fake the moon landing. They try and fake the moon landing at the same time as actually doing the moon landing. They’ve chosen literally the only way of presenting a moon landing movie that doesn’t possess a lick of internal logic. Either they do end up faking the moon landing, striking an interestingly conspiratorial tone for a cheery, old-fashioned studio rom com, or they don’t, so the whole thing doesn’t matter. Pick a side, Hollywood!
That this all kicks off weirdly late in the day – about 45 minutes in, I’d reckon – only makes it a more implausible pill to swallow. Johansson is brilliantly charming as the wise-cracking ad executive, and the bits where her and Tatum exchange flirty banter on the Florida beachfront are sweet. Fly Me To The Moon only proves more infuriating because it insists on showing glimpses of the film it could have been before the increasingly directionless plot was shoehorned on top.
That aimlessness, unfortunately, stems to some of the characters. Channing Tatum is a really great comic actor, but the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. His chief engineer alternates between impossibly slick, charming romantic lead and stressed-angry-grumpy-guts at the drop of a hat.
Tatum also seems like an odd choice for a NASA engineer. Chris Evans (from Marvel, not the radio) was originally pencilled in for the part, but he’s hardly overflowing with chief-boffin energy either. It doesn’t help that the wardrobe department has decided Channing should wear tight-fitting, brightly coloured polo shirts while everyone else in the room wears the more traditionally NASA-y short-sleeved shirt and black tie. His six-inch biceps make him stand out enough without decking him out for a shift on the Enterprise.
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Even so, all this might be forgivable if they got the rom-com bits right. But the latter half of the film just feels like it’s been hammered into the wrong shape. The romantic slow dance comes after the first kiss, not before; a key scene establishing a character is very good at drawing seems to be missing; every other transition has some weird comic-book-panel-thing going on.
It’s all very confusing, really. While it’s hard not to applaud Apple and Sony for taking a punt on an ambitious, original rom-com, it’s equally hard to figure out why they did. That Fly Me To The Moon has so many individual jokes, characters and scenes which work only makes its structural messiness more exasperating. There’s an equally original (and significantly cheaper) version of this film buried in here somewhere. Instead, director Greg Berlanti and co have taken aim at the moon and missed.
Fly Me To The Moon is in UK cinemas 11th July before streaming on AppleTV+ later this year.
