The Cute Stuff

Gentle lunacy dominates the earthbound love story Fly Me to the Moon, a fanciful-to-a-fault office romance that reimagines NASA’s lunar landing as the launching pad for two mismatched but very fetching alpha types. 

Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) is a decorated fighter pilot turned straight-laced NASA director. Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is the fast-talking, fib-addicted Madison Avenue marketing savant hired to “sell the moon.” And the movie reduces the Apollo Program—one of America’s greatest and most inspiring high-stakes scientific achievements—to a billion-dollar Floridian meet-cute. 

Those expecting a light-hearted version of Damien Chazelle’s intense First Man, or a rom-com take on Philip Kaufman’s slyly satiric saga The Right Stuff, will instead find lumpy comic rhythms and factual accuracy more in line with TV’s astronaut magic-wish confection I Dream of Jeannie. Although Cole isn’t a hapless astronaut and Kelly is far from a Cocoa Beach djinn, Fly Me to the Moon falls more in line with the show’s boob-tube simplicity and dumbed-down view of human foibles. 

FLY ME TO THE MOON  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Greg Berlanti
Written by: Rose Gilroy
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jim Rash, Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins, Noah Robbins, Ray Romano, Woody Harrelson
Running time: 132 mins

One running joke is a character’s addition to Tab sodas. Another is Kelly’s assistant and her boy-crazy ogling of the twentysomething engineer nerds. And a recurring sight gag involves a black cat bringing bad luck—which embarrassingly becomes the film’s climax. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to write a script, but maybe consulting one or two wouldn’t have been a bad idea. 

 The basic premise is rooted in reality: after a decade of space-race hysteria and red-scare-fueled government funding, public support is wavering, especially in the face of 1968’s political unrest and the compounded assassinations of MLK and RFK. Cole has only seven months before the July, 1969 deadline for Apollo’s moon launch, and knows his eager Kennedy Space Center team of engineers is badly underfunded and understaffed. Enter Kelly, whose knack for publicity and high tolerance for a good lie makes her the exact rocket fuel they need to make the American public fall back in love with the outer limits. 

“You can’t just fake people!” Cole cries as Kelly hires actors to portray all the senior staff who either don’t want to be interviewed or are too just tongue-tied and unphotogenic to be useful. She even lands deals with big brand names like Omega watches, Corvette cars and Rice Krispies cereal. Neat, right? Except the film’s facts are just as much of a lie as Kelly’s actors. 

In real life, NASA was always hip to sharing their ad astra cool with major corporate tie-ins. An Omega watch first went into space back in 1962. Astronaut Alan Shepard likewise got a free ’Vette in 1961. And Kellogg’s started putting moon-exploring spacemen as toy surprises in boxes of Rice Krispies way back in 1959. “No bucks, no Buck Rogers,” says Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff. He and his fellow Mercury astronauts were just as savvy about leveraging their press attention in order to get what they wanted and make sure the government paid NASA’s bills.

Furthering the film’s preposterous alternate universe of facts, Fly Me to the Moon has a cartoonish Nixonian spook named Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a shadowy G-man hell-bent on using NASA to project Capitalist strength and resolve to America’s Commie competitors.  

His ultimate scheme: forcing Kelly to secretly produce a fake version of the moon walk as insurance against any possible high-risk failures with the moonshot Moon Shot. Cue Jim Rash to come swishing in as a ’60s-era high-strung Paul Lynde type, the Kelly-coined “Kubrick of commercials” who directs this fictitious version of the truth. Overwrought hijinks ensue, as do revelations about Kelly’s illicit past that allow for a change of heart and noble sacrifices that bring her and Cole closer together. Meanwhile, actual heroes—namely the Apollo crew—accomplish actually heroic feats of extraterrestrial derring-do.

It’s hard to tell a romance that’s as compelling as the backdrop for this particular one. Then again, preternaturally attractive leads in fetching outfits doing their best to prop up a $100 million production sure is easy on the eyes, if not the brain. You cast stars as star-crossed lovers shooting men into the stars? Something’s bound to twinkle. And, more often than it deserves to, this earnest, open-hearted, empty-headed romp manages to sprinkle a little stardust on its viewers. Fly Me to the Moon doesn’t exactly soar, but it doesn’t completely crash and burn either.