“Fly Me to the Moon” exceeds expectations.
This isn’t a critique of the marketing campaign for this space race rom-com, featuring a straight-laced NASA man and a Madison Avenue marketing savant brought in to sell the mission to the moon. It’s more a comment on the current state of theatrical moviegoing.
Films like this, with bona fide movie stars Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, a slick, glossy look, an original concept, and a sparkling title, are rare at local cinemas. We’ve been conditioned to assume such films are either high-budget streamer products or fake, like movies-within-a-movie that are mostly there for laughs but also somewhat plausible.
Both assumptions hold some truth, but the former is essentially correct: This is an Apple production that, like “Napoleon” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” will debut in theaters first, on Friday, through a traditional studio (Sony’s Columbia Pictures). It’s not merely a gesture to theaters either — its streaming date is yet to be announced.
Directed by television veteran Greg Berlanti, whose films include “Love, Simon” and “Life as We Know It,” the film takes a stylistic and tonal page from Peyton Reed’s “Down with Love,” the 1960s via 2003 Rock Hudson/Doris Day pastiche starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. The script, by Rose Gilroy with a story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, is lighthearted and breezy with a pleasing screwball energy, giving Johansson the chance to use her full star power as the shrewd, self-made Kelly Jones. She’s a kind of female Don Draper minus the melancholy and dalliances but with some secret baggage and the ability to charm and persuade just about anyone.
If you make it past the opening montage, a cringey history lesson that has all the depth and nuance of a half-page, single-space elementary school report on the space race, you’re in for a mostly pleasant, if meandering, ride courtesy of Johansson, who produced, Tatum, and a talented roster of supporting actors (Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Jim Rash). Tatum might be a little miscast as the NASA launch director (and Korean War vet) Cole Davis. Though he is a good match for Johansson and the array of knit sweaters he sports throughout, his portrayal makes Cole too instantly likable for there to be any sort of dramatic stakes or tension. Whether this was a script-level miscalculation, a directorial choice, or a casting issue is hard to say. But there is no will-they-won’t-they, only when-will-they, which is not compelling storytelling when your runtime stretches over two hours.
This movie is in no rush to reach its destination. The main selling point of the trailer, that Kelly has been hired to stage a fake moon landing in case anything goes wrong with Apollo 11, isn’t even introduced until deep into the film. It’s not the main point of the story at all, just an aspect of it, which is a little disorienting during a first-time viewing. Rash, as a diva director-for-hire for this top-secret film project, makes these scenes very funny (although the recurring Kubrick jokes fall flat). Most attempts to reference the era beyond the great costuming and production design are quite superficial – it’s a kind of rose-colored-glasses version of the late 1960s in which racism and homophobia are practically nonexistent. Misogyny and former President Richard Nixon are punchlines and tolerable nuisances.
Another misstep was spending too much time with the Apollo 11 astronauts, down to the obligatory launch – a sequence that we’ve seen so many times and so much more effectively that there is little to be gained in clumsily shoehorning it into this kind of film. It’s just an expensive distraction, grasping at grandeur that it didn’t really need.
“Fly Me to the Moon” is at its best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The most worthwhile concept it sells is the idea of Johansson and Tatum (which, by the way, is a great reminder to rewatch “Hail, Caesar!”) as a modern Day and Hudson. They have the charm; they just need material that does it justice.
“Fly Me to the Moon,” an Apple Original Films/Columbia Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for “some strong language, smoking.” Running time: 132 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
“ Fly Me to the Moon ” is better than it looks.
Paraluman P. Funtanilla
Paraluman P. Funtanilla is Tutubi News Magazine's Marketing Specialist and is a Contributing Editor. She finished her degree in Communication Arts in De La Salle Lipa. She has worked as a Digital Marketer for start-up businesses and small business spaces for the past two years. She has earned certificates from Coursera on Brand Management: Aligning Business Brand and Behavior and Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content. She also worked with Asia Express Romania TV Show.
