Weariness for mid-century astronaut movies butts heads with the inspired pairing of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in a rom-com via Fly Me to the Moon (now streaming on Apple TV+), a bit of NASA histfic focusing on the PR campaign that put the Apollo missions on the lips of every living American. Funny how the Cold War-inspired Space Race and the promise of an American setting foot on the moon needed a marketing boost, but it was a decade of turmoil and attention spans were splintered, I guess. Somewhat oddly, the film, directed by Greg Berlanti, underwhelmed at the box office, earning $42 million after Apple Studios spent a pretty ridiculous $100 million to make it. Perhaps the underwhelm manifested once word got out that this movie never really gets off the ground, not to mention creating enough propulsive force to overcome the intense gravity of Earth’s atmosphere and bust out of orbit, zooming 238,900 miles to the nearest heavenly body. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
The Gist: Cole Davis (Tatum) is the launch director for NASA’s Apollo missions, which essentially makes him the do-everything guy. We meet him as he uses a broom to detect a nitrogen leak and survives a modest explosion – just another day of work on what’s increasingly feeling like a cursed project. He spots a black cat and freaks out about bad luck and all that baloney, which illustrates how a man so fiercely dedicated to science science science can be pushed into the realm of woo-woo superstition by failure and misfortune. Meanwhile, in New York, Kelly Jones (Johansson) is such a creative creative director for an ad agency, she isn’t afraid to pretend she’s pregnant while pitching a campaign to Ford Motor Co. sexist jerksteaks. She’s an artist when it comes to marketing spin and salesmanship. One day, she’s approached by a shadowy government figure, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), whose last name is just begging to be a slang verb for a weird sex maneuver. He wants Kelly to schlep down to Cocoa Beach, Florida and mount a marketing campaign for the Apollo missions. “They want you to sell the Moon?” muses Kelly’s assistant, Ruby (Anna Garcia), and we’re encouraged to believe that Kelly could sell anacondas to ophidiophobes, which makes her perfect for the job.
The night before she strolls into NASA like she owns the damn place, Kelly meets Cole at a local diner. She accidentally sets fire to her papers and he smothers it with his jacket and then tells her she’s the most beautiful thing since very beautiful sliced bread. Neither knows what the other does for a living until they re-meet at the testing facility, which is when he declares that he has zero time whatsoever to work with a PR wonk because This Is The Apollo Mission And We’re Sending People To The Moon Which Is Very Fricking Important. I mean, he’s trying to account for the weight of every proton and electron that’s gonna be on that spacecraft, and besides, using the Apollo program to sell Tang just seems stupid and annoying.
But Kelly’s persuasive, and she becomes increasingly important once threats to mission funding emerge, forcing them to woo and cajole U.S. Senators and such, which of course is smack in the middle of her ethically smudgy M.O. That’s just one of about 376 subplots that get in the way of us seeing Johansson and Tatum sqush lips – if Kelly and Cole can stop pretending to not like each other despite the intense animal magnetic attraction between them, which inevitably happens to the two most attractive people in any movie. We get a series of scenes in which she comes up with a great idea and he says no but ends up having to do it anyway, and before you know it, every American is afflicted with Moon Fever. They share their past struggles – she lived in a car with her mom until they started scraping by doing door-to-door sales, and he carries the weight of the Apollo I mission, which resulted in the death of three astronauts. Meanwhile, it takes a damn hour to get to the real plot of this movie, which finds Moe Berkus pulling a real Berkus and blackmailing Kelly to make a fake movie of the Moon landing, in case the real one fails. Oh boy.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Fly Me to the Moon (not to be confused with the 2003 animated movie Fly Me To The Moon, which is about flies who go to the Moon – no, really), is like Hidden Figures or Apollo 13 meets a love-hate rom-com like, say, Berlanti’s Duhamel-Heigl non-classic Life as We Know It.
Performance Worth Watching: Johansson does her best here, giving a spirited performance in a movie that doesn’t deserve it. And a better movie would make more out of Harrelson’s scene-stealing capabilities; it’s just more wasted potential.
Memorable Dialogue: Kelly: “I think we should’ve gotten Kubrick.”
Sex and Skin: None. Bummer!
Our Take: Fly Me to the Moon looks terrific. The production design, art direction and costumes exhibit the period detail we should expect from a Hollywood movie with a nine-figure budget. But it’s all for naught, since the screenplay, by Rose Gilroy, is a half-assed mess. A bunch of stuff happens over the course of a wearisome 132 minutes, and none of it sticks: It’s a light comedy, it’s a period drama, it’s a romance, it’s a farce, it’s a sincere celebration of American civic pride. Berlanti needs to pick a dang tone and angle here. Lean into the they-faked-the-moon-landing thing – a chunk of real-life conspiracy-theory nonsense that’s begging to be satirically lanced like a boil – and you might have a movie, and one that isn’t quite like a lot of stuff we’ve seen many times before.
But what we’ve got here is a confusion, a collection of underdeveloped subplots and character arcs tossed together almost haphazardly. Cole and Kelly have a modest handful of traits between them: He’s a paper-thin wearer of mock turtlenecks who doesn’t have much going on above that turtleneck, leaving Tatum with few opportunities to dole out his signature charm. She has a little more to her – she’s shoveled a ton of bullroar in her career, but faking the Moon landing is a bridge too far – and Johansson does her best to amuse us with a wink and a cocked eyebrow beneath a large number of Very Sixties Wigs.
Let’s face it, we’re here to watch Tatum and Johansson cultivate a romantic alchemical spark – read: we want to see them by turns kiss and exchange witty banter – but there’s no room in this overcomplicated hodgepodge passing for a story, which frankly makes little sense. The ol’ opposites-attract love-hate plot can always be freshened with a bit of smart dialogue and inspired performances, but that’s secondary to Fly Me to the Moon’s insistence upon rehashing the suspense of the Apollo 13 launch in tired sequences with white-shirt-and-tie guys with hornrims and cigarettes sweating in the command center (one of them played by Ray Romano, a role and character barely worth mentioning), shots of civilians crowding around their TVs to cheer the launch and landing and the inevitable Walter Cronkite real-life archival footage. Granted, the climax is gussied up with a wrinkle in the fake-landing plot that amps the tension a bit, but is resolved in the silliest manner possible. Wait. Where was I? Wasn’t I writing about how we want to see Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum squeeze each other? See how this movie gets us hopelessly sidetracked? See? See?
Our Call: Abort mission! SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.