Marketer extraordinaire Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is hired to improve NASA’s public image ahead of the Apollo 11 launch.
If there was any doubt that the Apollo 11 moon landing was completely cinematically overdone: think again. For what it’s worth, Greg Berlanti’s delightful space comedy at least offers a fresh, revisionist perspective. Here, advertising expert Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is plucked from her cushy job in New York and tasked with giving the underfunded NASA a much-needed PR boost in the run-up to that fateful mission. But this promising premise is squandered by a convoluted plot that makes the film more complicated than it needs to be.
There’s a fun workplace romantic comedy somewhere in Fly Me To The Moon. Kelly’s gung-ho PR style clashes with the more practical launch manager Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), who grows increasingly exasperated when Kelly wrangles Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins over sponsorship of Omega watches and cereal ads. But even Cole can’t deny the power of good marketing, and there’s no doubt that the chemistry is fading between the duo. Not many corny pans of starry skies can extinguish the infectious charm of the film’s space race romance.
Despite its hefty $100 million price tag, Fly Me To The Moon is full of flat, uninspired cinematography.
But oddly enough, this is a film made up of two strangely disparate halves. The first is formulaic but breezy, before turning into a second, lesser stretch focusing on recruiting Kelly to secretly film a mock moon landing, should the real mission fail. She is hesitant but agrees out of necessity. There are vague references to Kelly’s shady past, but by keeping the audience in the dark about the details, Rose Gilroy’s frustrating screenplay saps Kelly’s high-wire operation with real stakes when she is threatened by her mysterious boss (Woody Harrelson). If there’s anything as tiring as a live recreation of
Moon landings, they’re movies about creating a fake moon landing.
When Armstrong finally sets foot on the moon, the scene itself arrives as an afterthought, as if it had been done so to death on screen that there was no point in reinventing the wheel. But as films like First Man have shown, it’s still very possible to infuse tension and wonder into a well-known event like Apollo 11. It also doesn’t help that it’s so boring to look at. Despite its hefty $100 million price tag, Fly Me To The Moon is full of flat, uninspired cinematography that fails to make the most of its ambitious setting.
With its stellar cast, engaging 1960s-era scenes, and sky-high stakes, Berlanti’s film has all the right parts to make a winning rom-com, but the result is disjointed and disappointing. Fly Me To The Moon shoots for the stars but never quite reaches those lofty heights.
Greg Berlanti’s revised comedy offers a fresh look at the Apollo 11 moon landing, but its convoluted plot fails to capitalize on the charm of the workplace romance between Johansson and Tatum.
