Fly Me to the Moon Is a NASA Rom-Com that Fails To Launch
Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson star in what may be the first romantic comedy about government funding disputes.
If nothing else, Fly Me to the Moon is probably the first romantic comedy structured around a dispute over federal funding. One hopes it's also the last.
Set during the heyday of NASA's moon missions, the movie tells the story of Cole Davis, a hunky moonshot flight director (Channing Tatum), and Kelly Jones, a Madison Avenue marketing wizard (Scarlett Johansson), who must work together to sell the moon landing to both the public and skeptical members of Congress. And, also, fake the moon landing, Stanley Kubrick-style, just in case anything goes wrong.
It's an inventive setup with real potential, and the leading duo provide plenty of movie-star rocket fuel. But the underwhelming script and scattered story don't deliver on the premise. If Fly Me to the Moon were a mission to space, it would be regarded as a failure to launch.
Although the moon shot is now revered as one of the last moments where Americans proved they could do and build big things, the movie begins by reminding viewers that in its own time, it was perceived quite differently—as a wasteful federal program that deprived ordinary Americans of scarce public resources. It was, in other words, a classic big-government boondoggle, or, perhaps, a moondoggle.
With the program struggling from lack of public support and the threat of yanked funding from Washington, a mysterious White House operative named Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) decides to bring in Jones to use modern advertising techniques to improve public perception of NASA's mission.
Jones, we are supposed to understand, is an ad-world superstar who also happens to be a bit of a con artist: When we first encounter her, she's pitching a new muscle car marketing plan to a group of middle-aged male car executives. Her big idea? Highlight the seatbelts, which in the late 1960s were on the precipice of becoming mandatory, and which might make wives feel more comfortable with a sports car. (You always know you're in for a fun night at the movies when the film starts with a scene designed to give you warm tingles about federal transportation regulations.)
To help make her case, Jones fakes being pregnant with an artificial baby bump. The scene is supposed to demonstrate how clever she is—a modern career woman, thinking in ways that male has-beens never could—but mostly it shows how dumb the movie is. It's tendentious and smug, too cute by half, and it relies on the credulity-straining premise that execs at a national auto brand would be totally unaware of the sales implications of safety features they installed before a regulatory requirement went into place.
More potentially interesting is the movie's treatment of President Richard Nixon: Early on, Jones' assistant proclaims herself a card-carrying feminist who could never work for Nixon. But then she proceeds to do just that, and the matter is mostly dropped. Fly Me to the Moon can't decide whether it wants to treat Nixon as a villain or give him some sort of props for being the president who presided over NASA's first successful manned mission to the moon. A better film might have captured some nuance or complication in its portrayal, but Fly Me to the Moon is content to stay simplistic and shallow.
It doesn't help that an hour in, after Kelly and Cole have begun to sell the space program to skeptical members of Congress, the movie introduces another subplot about faking the moon landing just in case anything goes wrong with the real mission. This storyline is handled with broad silliness, which makes for an awkward contrast with the film's insistence on the, er, gravity of the lunar mission, and its repeated nods to a trio of astronauts who died on the launchpad due to safety malfunctions. It's not impossible to mix somberness with silliness, but Fly Me to the Moon never achieves liftoff with either.
What's left is a fun concept with appealing leads that, sadly, has been poorly engineered from the ground up. Johansson and Tatum are charming enough that Fly Me to the Moon doesn't quite crash and burn. But coming, as it does, in a time in which big-screen romances are in decline, and the genre has mostly retreated to smaller-scale streaming affairs, it's enough to make you worry: At least as far as rom-coms go, maybe Hollywood can't do big things.
