Fly Me to the Moon

Overview

Originally, Scarlett Johansson (Asteroid City) and Chris Evans (Pain Hustlers) were set to reteam for Fly Me to the Moon, sans Marvel heroes but with championing America — the country rather than the Captain — still on the itinerary. Every movie can play the "what if?" casting game, whether through attached stars that left for various reasons (scheduling conflicts after the director changed here) or via audiences simply offering their own picks, yet this one isn't helped by the shadow of what might've been. On paper, Johansson and Channing Tatum (Magic Mike's Last Dance), who are also reuniting after the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar!, are a winning pair. One succeeds more than the other in this 60s-set space-race screwball rom-com that's also about selling US exceptionalism, and joins Operation Avalanche and Capricorn One among cinema's fake missions into the heavens, too. The picture's entertaining-enough fate runs in parallel to its plot: there, for the shadowy government operative who pushes Johansson and Tatum's characters into each other's orbits, a good-enough approximation of the moon landing over the real thing will do.

A delight as ever in comic mode with depth, Johansson turns in the type of charming performance that Hollywood could build a series around, on screens either big or small. She's Kelly Jones, a Manhattan advertising executive with the gift of knowing how to pitch whatever she needs to get the client, and then to also get the masses to consume. Director Greg Berlanti (Love, Simon) and first-time screenwriter Rose Gilroy, working with a story by Bill Kirstein (Mean Girls circa 2024's cinematographer) and Keenan Flynn (a producer on Beyoncé's Lemonade), introduce her putting on the whole show. Kelly has dismissive and misogynistic automotive executives in her sights, who think that she's present for refreshments. Aided by a baby bump that augments the act, she has soon convinced them on the merits of spruiking seat belts in sports cars.

With backing from the very top of the country, aka Nixon, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson, Suncoast) has other plans for Kelly: serving her nation by gifting NASA her spin. Fondness for the fat stacks of cash being spent on all things astronomical are falling out of favour with politicians and the public alike, hence the request — a demand that she can't refuse, really — for Kelly's services. Johansson gleams in Fly Me to the Moon, nailing the boldness that keeps driving her character forward and the banter no matter who she's talking to, while also ensuring that impact of Kelly's shady backstory feels genuine. With Party Down, Hacks and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia alum Anna Garcia as supportive assistant Ruby Martin, she scores her best double act of the movie. But even when he's not breaking into the tune that everyone has stuck in their head just from reading this feature's title, Harrelson is having a ball, far more so than Tatum.

As Cole Davis, the straight-arrow hero war pilot-turned-mission commander at Cape Kennedy as the Apollo 11 launch nears, Tatum is instantly in a more-serious register than his co-stars. The job on-screen is literally rocket science — and Cole too has baggage, the details of which crib from actuality with a near-flippancy that borders on tasteless. Sincerity shimmers when Cole initially crosses paths with Kelly at a diner, telling her that she's the most-beautiful woman he's ever seen, and also that she's on fire (again, literally), but there's little room for it when they start butting heads as new colleagues with different agendas. Tatum plays his part like he'd be far happier in a romance without the comic battle. In contrast, Johansson relishes channelling Doris Day against Rock Hudson in the repartee. If this was a TV series, there'd be time for Cole to warm up and settle in; however, the film doesn't boast it even clocking in at a lengthy-and-feels-it 132 minutes.

Thankfully, there's still an inherent spark just by getting Johansson and Tatum in the same frame, which keeps Fly Me to the Moon rolling although never soaring. If the idea by Berlanti, Gilroy and company was to make the plot busy to compensate for anything that doesn't fully ignite, they've committed to the concept with thruster-level gusto as the narrative unfurls. Kelly doesn't just have to weave her PR wonders with Cole zipping between glowering and flirting — a gig that's filled with faux engineers and astronauts stepping in for interviews (Henry Smalls, played by Bupkis' Ray Romano, is one scientist who's replaced) and product placement galore — or merely help schmooze naysayers who might scrap the space agency's budget. In secret, in a ploy that she's told to keep that way from Cole, she's also tasked by Moe with the stuff that conspiracy theorists' fantasies have been made of for 55 years: going all Tinseltown, complete with the egomaniacal "Kubrick of commercials" Lance Vespertine (Jim Rash, Loot), to stage the events of July 20–21, 1969 in case history doesn't happen the way it's meant to.

It's clear why the movie has magicked up a movie-magic angle, and not only because cinema loves paying tribute to itself. Without it, there's no tension in a will-it-won't-it riff on Apollo 11. Viewers know how the attempt to make one giant leap for mankind eventuated, so whether or not Kelly can retain NASA's funding isn't a suspenseful section of the story. With its showbiz farce, Fly Me to the Moon does more than add drama beyond Kelly and Cole's own will-they-won't-they, though — it has a blast executing the chaos that springs. That said, Berlanti also cements the sensation that he's smashing together competing tones, and also making huge jumps between them. It's easy to see how Fly Me to the Moon would've fared solely with an inside-filmmaking spoof vibe, as 2024's Down with Love or just following opposites-attracting affairs of the heart against a shooting-for-the-moon backdrop, for instance, but its array of elements are haphazardly duct-taped to each other.

There's a dream at the heart of the film, of course, which Kelly knows that she's slinging and the feature's dialogue isn't afraid to utter with frequency: the dream of hope, of aiming high and even of dreaming itself, given the realities of the era's wars and political situation. Half a century later, in a world just as uncertain, these notions aren't relics of the past. To those watching, Fly Me to the Moon tries a similar feat as it peers upwards with plenty of Dariusz Wolski's (Napoleon) glossy cinematography — and as Johansson's outfits prove a sight to behold, and also her Saturday Night Live-star husband Colin Jost pops up briefly — by asking audiences to buy into the dream of being affably swept away. While saying that something is so isn't the same as making it so, as the narrative is well-aware, Johansson's efforts come closest to securing liftoff.