Review: FLY ME TO THE MOON Flies On Charm But Little Else

NASA has a problem. It is months away from the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to land the first men on the Moon, but public enthusiasm for the program seems to be waning. With the threat of budget cuts from Congress potentially stalling out the Apollo 11 mission, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) reaches out to Madison Avenue advertising maverick Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) , convincing her to head up a new public relations office at the space agency. Not so enthusiastic about the idea is flight director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum). He takes a dim view of the steps that Kelly makes to win back public support for the Apollo missions, even if he can’t argue with their positive result. After a friendship begins to develop between the two, it is suddenly threatened when Cole discovers one thing that Moe has asked Kelly to do that flies in the face of everything he believes in.

Director Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me To The Moon works best when it relies on the screen presence and chemistry of its two leads. It has been some time since we’ve seen Johansson play the lead in a comedy – 2017’s Rough Night – and she seems to be enjoying herself. Here, her Kelly Jones is a smart woman, usually just a few steps ahead of the men she typically has to deal with. But she never plays her character’s position contemptuously. Instead, her character is more bemused. Out-thinking her male opponents is as a game to her, one she enjoys and one she usually wins. Channing Tatum’s Cole is something of a balancing act. As the launch director for the Apollo missions, Cole is fully consumed by his job and in part driven by the real-world tragedy that befell the Apollo 1 mission that left three astronauts dead. But Tatum makes sure that that darkness doesn’t overwhelm his portrayal. He has gotten really good at subtle comic reactions and it serves him well here when Cole can barely hide his frustration at the changes Kelly brings to Cape Canaveral.

The film does a great job with its period setting, helped in no small part from some of the location footage shot at the old NASA launch center in Florida. If you ever had an interest in the space program of the 1960s, this feels like a good approximation of what it might have been like. (Minus the whole faking the moon landing conspiracy nonsense.) Berlanti has also assembled a strong group of supporting players around his two leads from Ray Ramano’s older, mentor figure to Tatum’s Cole to Jim Rash’s fussy commercial director brought in by Kelly to oversee the shooting of the fake moon landing footage.

The “We need to fake the moon landing” hook that the film has been partly promoted off of only comes about in the second half of the movie. As such, it feels as if the concept really doesn’t gets explored as much as it could within the context of the romantic comedy Berlenti is crafting. As it stands in the film, it feels more like a third act complication thrown in to pad the runtime rather than story material that could explore the relationship between Kelly and Cole. And given the strength of the two leads here, that’s a bit of a disappointment.