Fly Me to the Moon
★★
What ultimately doesn’t work about Greg Berlanti’s “Fly Me to the Moon” isn’t the fact that its two leads, for all their magnetic star power, have no chemistry with one another, or the fact that it has the washed out digital sheen of a cheap Apple TV+ original, or that it only manages to muster a half-effort humming of the Sinatra song from which it gets its title. The failing that keeps this thing squarely on the launch-pad is that its every beat is so obvious and trite you could have guessed all of that from the poster.
Cole David (Channing Tatum) is the launch director of Apollo 11, in the final months of preparations to send men to the moon. Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is a marketing specialist brought in to make the increasingly controversial NASA program more appealing to the American population. As the public relations campaign gains momentum, a government agent (Woody Harrelson) steps in to oversee the staging of a fake moon landing to be used as a back-up. Kelly’s all over it, Cole is too strait-laced to ever entertain such an idea. The two are undeniably attracted to each other, but clash in their work. But maybe, just maybe, they can put their differences aside for a greater cause and learn to appreciate and even love each oth—yeah, you see where this is going.
In a film of overdone humour and flimsy dramatic beats, the primary culprit is Rose Gilroy’s screenplay. The central premise is propulsive enough, but Gilroy dilutes it over a needlessly lengthy script in which characters are both flat outlines without depth and overdrawn figures with multiple motivators. Over and over, I wished for the film to simplify itself. A late-film reveal of Johansson’s character’s backstory is superfluous development, overcrowding a straightforward character for little reward. Tatum’s motivator is more attuned to the film around it, though the movie seems to entirely forget it when it isn’t especially relevant to the scene at hand. Woody Harrelson’s character, meanwhile, is a hollow caricature; we never actually learn his role in government, but he possesses both complete anonymity and cartoonishly extreme authority and status.
Were this a full-on comedy, few of these issues would matter. In fact, they’d hardly register so long as the humour landed. But Gilroy and director Berlanti can never pin down one tone long enough to sustain it effectively. “Fly Me to the Moon” wants to be an airy rom-com, a compelling period drama, and an inspiring tale of human triumph, but it cannot be all. The attempt to spread itself across these tones and genres leaves the film thin, aimless and disjointed. The humour is ineffective and gratingly obvious — it played like gangbusters to the gaggle of middle-aged white women in my theatre who howled at every “so that just happened” style of remark — but it is also difficult to tell how funny the film is even trying to be. At points, Berlanti will undercut his own humorous situations and interplays with a jarring emotional beat, and vice versa. When the film devotes time to developing its characters in potentially meaningful ways, it not only comes off emotionally dissonant and formulaic, but it retroactively feels less valuable when it is chased with screwball absurdity.
Channing Tatum, for all his stellar comedic work elsewhere, is the wrong choice here. At the risk of offending current high-ranking NASA directors, the bulky and charming Tatum does not feel reflective of the brainy scientific-types who tend to occupy that role. He manages to sell a few dramatic beats and land some punchlines, but is frequently upstaged by his tank top, which is comically defined under every single shirt he wears throughout the film, like an unintended running gag of wardrobe failure. Scarlett Johansson does wholly unmemorable work here, likeable enough but entirely devoid of identifiable personality. She’ll say a snarky comment or get fired up in her classic ScarJo way, but that’s all you’ll get from her. She and Tatum have all the romantic electricity of driftwood, placed opposite each other for their marketable faces rather than a natural rapport.
So what do we have here? A comedy without laughs, a romance without chemistry, a drama of lifeless stick figures. Berlanti manages to scrape together some rousing moments in the home-stretch, leaning on the inherent awe of the Apollo 11 mission in occasionally moving capacity. The moon landing never fails to be powerfully affecting in its scale, even in a film such as this. But besides this, “Fly Me to the Moon” is flat and unrewarding. And it’s a shame, too, because the premise could have sustained a wonderfully snappy ninety minute comedy. Perhaps instead of bringing Johansson in to spruce up NASA’s image, and then introducing the comic fake-moon-landing scenario nearly halfway into the film, the staged production could have been the central reason for her presence, introduced at the beginning of the film, so her and Tatum’s parallel preparations for different moon landings might have made for some effective comedic tension. Who knows?
Ultimately, “Fly Me to the Moon” doesn’t have the fuel for lift-off. It’s no disaster; it doesn’t combust on ignition or spin into a frenzy. But it simply doesn’t have the spark to leave Earth’s atmosphere. The rom-com is neither romantic nor comedic, its drama is bland and underdeveloped, and the most “triumph of the human spirit” that I felt was surprise at my own ability to sit there and take it for all 132 minutes. Perhaps Berlanti and co. should have planned a back-up.