Columbia. 2024. Comedy. 131mins.
Grade: 2 out of 4
If one were asked “what kind of movie is Fly Me to the Moon” the best response might be, “too many kinds of movies.” Director Greg Berlanti’s would-be confection—weighed down by ill-fitting complications and earnest drama—is begging to be a straight-ahead romantic comedy of the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn variety with Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson as the bickering twosome. And that would have been enough, especially given its promising setting of late-1960’s NASA headquarters as it prepares to launch the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon. But Berlanti, working from a presumably phonebook-sized script by Rose Gilroy, Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, can’t stop larding on the dramatic left turns while an engaging Johansson vainly flings zippy dialogue towards the black hole of stale grumpiness that is Tatum’s character. This mix of workplace comedy, historical drama, and light farce never entirely fits together which is inevitable when chirpy humor tries to cohabitate with the tragic 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed three NASA astronauts. In a summer bereft of romantic comedies, watching the occasionally engaging Fly Me to the Moon is certainly better than rewatching Netflix’s lamentable 2023 hit Anyone But You, mostly by virtue of its undeniable if misapplied ambition. And in this era of relentless IP it’s a shame to knock an old-fashioned star vehicle for trying too hard. But this overdesigned behemoth of a comedy is too unwieldy to reach escape velocity.
Had Berlanti (TV’s former king of soapy teen angst) not been so hellbent on the folly of creating cinema’s first dramatic screwball comedy, we would have gladly ignored its many improbabilities. It all starts with Johansson’s Kelly Jones, a clever, you-go-girl advertising exec not beneath wearing a fake baby bump to pitch a room full of chauvinistic corporate hotshots. Jones, it turns out, has an oh-so-melodramatic secret history, one that plays less as a surprise character turn then yet another self-serious millstone bogging things down. But her lie-filled past is actually an asset to Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson, squeezing every drop of charming disrepute out his character), a shadowy something or other in the Nixon administration who parachutes into the movie at odd moments to move the story along. Initially, he approaches Kelly and offers to move her to Florida so she can use her PR prowess to help NASA sell the Apollo program to a hesitant Congress and an American public preoccupied with the Vietnam War.
IRL, of course, America was also preoccupied with the 1968 deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and while those history-altering events are not namechecked here, it does remind us that the time in which Berlanti sets his film contains too much real life tragedy creeping in from the edges to support the sparkling comedy that Johansson and Tatum are trying so hard to sell. As it is, after Kelly decamps to Cape Kennedy, she immediately begins sparing with Tatum’s Cole Davis, a NASA launch director in a constant state of guilt over his role in the Apollo 1 disaster, hardly something that mixes well with two gorgeous A-listers flirting over sandwiches on the pier.
Cole’s ramrod sense of honor and dedication to the Apollo 11 mission does create some tasty conflict as Kelly concocts an Apollo-centric public relations plan that includes product integrations with Tang and Omega watches, which Cole thinks will cheapen a mission with the deadly serious purpose of beating the Russians to the moon. In one of the film’s only real laughs, she secretly hires handsome actors to play NASA’s nerdy group of scientists for news interviews, with Cole’s doppelganger standing right in front of him, awed by his Korean War service. It’s a central character conflict that makes sense in the broad strokes, as a man of integrity is forced to depend on a con woman tasked with selling the fantasy of something he considers to be of great consequence to the nation. For her part, Johansson has the look and the sass (and the wardrobe courtesy of costumer designer Mary Zophres) necessary to fit right into this kind of role, even one as unbelievable as Kelly, who wouldn’t pass a Level 1 government background check let alone blithely rocket up the NASA food chain. But she’s given a poor tennis partner in Tatum, who leans into the late 60’s “haircut to set your watch by,” starched crew neck honorability too heavily, leaving his aw-shucks charm stranded on the launchpad making their pairing a pure screenwriter’s necessity.
Indeed, very little of Fly Me to the Moon seems credible which may be survivable in a frothy romcom but troublesome in a film trying to juggle comedy, romance, drama, tragedy, and farce. The latter really sends the film off the rails as Moe blackmails Kelly into staging a fake moon landing in case the real moon landing ends in tragedy. Shooting, for some reason, at NASA where they could easily be discovered, Kelly wrangles a flamboyant director (Jim Rash, over the top but at least he’s funny), two astronaut-actors on wires who keep colliding into each other on set, and the black cat that threatens to ruin the production. Director Stanley Kubrick, whom real-life conspiracy theorists believe actually shot a faked moon landing on a soundstage, is mentioned twice. And one can only assume that Berlanti fancied himself as pointing a funhouse mirror towards our present day predilection for buying any cockamamie conspiracy theory, especially those involving the government. But the point never lands because this entire story thread is a misbegotten tradeoff of narrative sense for tepid laughs.
Fly Me to the Moon was originally produced for Apple TV+, yet another streaming service that never met a cut that was too long. The film comes in at just over two hours and proves—much like Netflix’s awful Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F with a running time of just under two hours and Killers of the Flower Moon with a running time of just under four days— that whatever algorithm decided that home audiences prefer their entertainment long and cumbersome needs serious adjusting. Imaging a world where Fly Me to the Moon was directed by Richard Curtis, Cameron Crowe, or the late Nora Ephron and intended strictly for theatrical release is to imagine a sleeker, sexier, more dramatically credible film than this one.