Moon Mission — FLY ME TO THE MOON

By Maribeth Thueson

Fly Me to the Moon is an unusual species for a summer movie — it has an original script and isn’t a sequel, remake, or part of a franchise. It would be wonderful if it were also a really good movie, but while it’s appealing in an inoffensive sort of way, it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Set during the 1960s in the lead-up to the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, Fly Me to the Moon has been marketed as a comedy about a group of folks faking the moon landing, but that plot point doesn’t come up until two-thirds of the way through the movie. Fly Me to the Moon is actually a rom-com about a fast-talking dame who runs rings around a flummoxed man, a la Hepburn/Tracy, Day/Hudson, or Stanwyk/anybody.

Scarlett Johansson plays a con woman who has had many names and professions but has settled on the name Kelly Jones and the profession of advertising. She’s so good at getting people to do what she wants that she is recruited by a shady White House operative, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), to do public relations for the Apollo program, which is fighting public apathy and a lack of congressional funding.

Kelly shows up at Cape Canaveral and quickly makes celebrities of the astronauts, much to the chagrin of flight director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum). He is haunted by the earlier deaths of three astronauts on the launchpad and believes that the space program should be taken seriously. Meanwhile, Kelly is signing product placement deals for NASA with the likes of Tang, so naturally she and Cole are in conflict.

Kelly has plenty of verve and she charms, cajoles, and teases several senators into supporting a funding bill, so the moon landing is on track. But then Berkus comes up with the idea of staging a fake landing in case anything goes wrong with the real one, so Kelly brings in a quirky commercial director (Jim Rash, who steals the show) and they build a lander on a sandy soundstage that is indistinguishable from the real one.

So did the world see the soundstage or the moon? Well, I can state categorically that no matter the twists and turns of the movie, the moon landing was real and was not directed by Stanley Kubrick (a persistent rumor jokingly referred to in the film).

Johansson shines as Kelly as she and her assistant (Ruby Martin) bulldoze their way through all opposition, all while wearing a series of fabulous outfits.The set designers got to go all out with the mid-century look, and director Greg Berlanti keeps the pace fast. But somehow Fly Me to the Moon never achieves the sparkle of those older movies, maybe because Tatum’s Cole is a little too dull, and he and Johansson don’t spark the way the old stars did. Nevertheless, I wish it success in the hopes that we get more movies that take a chance. It’s better to swing and miss than to never play the game at all.

Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on July 21, 2024.