Certificate: 12A
Running Time: 132 mins
UK Distributor: Sony Pictures
UK Release Date: 11 July 2024
Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Nick Dillenburg, Anna Garcia, Jim Rash, Noah Robbins, Colin Woodell, Christian Zuber, Donald Elise Watkins, Joe Chrest, Art Newkirk, Ashley Kings, Jonathan Orea Lopez, Eva Pilar, Chad Crowe, Will Jacobs, Melissa Litow, Lauren Revard
Greg Berlanti (director), Rose Gilroy (writer), Keenan Flynn, Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Lia and Sarah Schechter (producers), Daniel Pemberton (composer), Dariusz Wolski (cinematographer), Harry Jierjian (editor)
In the 1960s, a marketing specialist (Johansson) is brought in to boost NASA’s image…
Everyone knows the historic moment in 1969 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but the story is obviously far bigger than just that. Everyone recognises the hard and often thankless work of the numerous physicists and engineers, all draped in Mormon-like white shirts and ties at NASA’s Florida headquarters, that even made that momentous Apollo 11 mission possible, but the story is much bigger than even that.
In truth, a core and surprisingly underappreciated aspect of NASA’s success is the marketing. If it weren’t for whomever was charged with promoting Apollo 11 to the masses, essentially becoming the organisation’s own Joseph Goebbels (except, of course, without as much of the evil), it’s unlikely that anyone would even be interested in the most defining scientific achievement of the 20th century. Unfortunately, not a whole lot is known about who actually headed the NASA marketing department at the time, so it’s left to director Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon to provide a highly fictional but reasonably noble account of what might have gone on behind the scenes at the birthplace of Apollo 11 itself.
Set at the height of the 1960s Space Race, which initially saw the Soviet Union get a head start with the launch of both the Sputnik satellite and the first man in space, NASA is under immense pressure to get its moon mission up and running. The problem, though, is that public interest in the space program is at an all-time low, as is the institution’s funding, which is causing multiple headaches for team leader Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) as he and his fellow rocket scientists struggle to make waves with their mandate. Enter Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), a whip-smart marketing specialist with an acute talent for convincing anyone of just about anything. She’s brought on board by shady government agent Moe Burkus (Woody Harrelson) to bring NASA and its astronauts into the spotlight, and shortly after her publicity campaign gets underway – which includes advertising deals with Omega watches and Fruit of the Loom clothing, as well as her game-changing suggestion to put a video camera on the shuttle – the mission receives the attention that it desperately needs, while Kelly and Cole develop a bit of a thing themselves. However, things become far more complicated when Burkus instructs Kelly to carry out a new covert mission: to film a staged version of the moon landing, which would be shown on television in case the real one doesn’t pan out, in order to officially gain the upper hand over the Soviets.
As you can probably already tell, Fly Me to the Moon plays around quite heavily with a number of fantasies surrounding the Apollo 11 mission, including and especially the popular myth that the moon landing was shot on a soundstage instead of the moon itself. Berlanti’s film, and its script by debut writer Rose Gilroy, openly invites the viewer to take its own account of actual events with the biggest pinch of salt, because its goal is clearly not to provide a dramatic reenactment of the build-up and execution of the momentous mission – for something like that, you’re better off with Damien Chazelle’s underrated First Man, or even the commemorative documentary Apollo 11 from 2019 – but instead to use it as a whimsical backdrop for a charming and rather bouncy callback to classic Howard Hawks screwball farces like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday.
The results, admittedly, are mixed. You can definitely feel that familiar rat-a-tat nature in Gilroy’s script as actors swap witty dialogue like tennis balls at a Wimbledon final, and the imagined scenarios are ripe for comical set-pieces that could only exist in heightened realities like this one, including one involving that most superstitious of beings: a black cat. Then, there’s the comedic energy shared among leads Scarlett Johansson (on fiery form) and Channing Tatum (slightly miscast, but nonetheless serviceable), which like the spark between Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant before them is well suited for this kind of film, even if their chemistry doesn’t always sparkle as much as it should.
However, the film often struggles with maintaining that consistent screwball flow, with one too many tonal shifts and inconsistencies with the character development that ultimately threaten to leave it all buckling under its own weight. It is also, quite frankly, much longer than it needs to be. At just over two hours, Fly Me to the Moon reaches a point where it feels like things should finally be starting to wrap up, only for it to become apparent that we’re only just entering the climax. It creates a pacing issue that could easily have been solved by the removal of certain scenes and plot strands that largely do not matter in the overall scheme of things, which might have saved the film from being as unnecessarily prolonged as it is.
It is ultimately a film that knows what it wants to be, but perhaps needed another go in the editing bay or even another script draft before it could actually achieve what it wanted. There are glimpses of the properly crowd-pleasing screwball throwback it aims to become, and there might well be enough of it to satisfy most audiences, especially with some solid movie star turns by two reliable A-listers. However, it’s still about as far from being the best version of itself as we are to the actual moon right now.
Fly Me to the Moon is a highly fictional though respectable Space Race romp that comes close to being a crowd-pleasing throwback to Howard Hawks screwball farces, but structural inconsistencies and an overlong runtime keep its mission firmly grounded.
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