Fly Me to the Moon (2024) review

Dir. Greg Berlanti

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon has a tone similar to Netflix’s Unfrosted, something I wasn’t mentally ready to endure so soon after that catastrophe. The film exists in this awkward, liminal space where it takes a true story and infuses it with satirical happenstance, an overabundance of themes, and actors who can’t seem to get on the same page with their performances. Fly Me to the Moon isn’t technically based on/inspired by a true story, nor is it lifted from a book, which makes its mediocrity sting a bit more.

Scarlett Johansson stars as Kelly Jones, a motormouth advertising executive who is recruited by a mysterious government official (Woody Harrelson) to improve the image of America’s flailing space industrial complex. The space race has gone on long enough and cost an absurd amount of money, so much so that the public is getting tired of the hoopla coupled with their wasted tax dollars. Initially, Kelly starts small: she responds to NASA workers’ reluctance to do interviews with staging fake ones of her own. She kickstarts space-themed marketing campaign for Tang and Fruit of the Loom, and also has a meet-cute with NASA’s launch director, Cole Davis (Channing Tatum).

Now, Cole — here’s a real prick. He’s taken it upon himself to organize the construction and subsequent launch of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. He was supposed to be an astronaut, but unfortunate circumstance got in the way. He doesn’t seem to take much joy from his job, and he’s so fundamentally different than Kelly, beyond their respective career-spaces, that it doesn’t make a lick of sense why they would fall for one another romantically. Despite this, and Johansson and Tatum’s obvious lack of chemistry, Rose Gilroy’s script keeps forcing them together.

Not to mention the fact that Cole is at least sincere in the work he does. Kelly specializes in stretching the truth. When Kelly’s marketing campaign for NASA proves to be an overwhelming success for multiple brands and the company’s image, she is then tasked with staging a “backup” moon landing just in case the real one fails. Cole can’t know about this. Kelly hires a flamboyant commercial director in Jim Rash (who chews his scenery to the effect that it shows how this movie should’ve been played), and sets up the operation in a hangar far away from where the real scientists are working.

Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography reminded me a great deal of Down with Love, an effective panache of 1960s rom-coms. It’s colorful whimsy, easy on the eyes, and complemented nicely by lovely costuming (the work of the great Mary Zophres) and Shane Valentino’s production design, which details the hell out of the moon landing set and the “real world” that exists outside of it.

This is a story you could envision Rock Hudson and Doris Day, ala Pillow Talk, headlining, effectively ironing out the narrative flaws therein. But with scant chemistry between Johansson and Tatum, plus the usually charismatic Tatum’s Cole being a consistent buzzkill from the jump, Gilroy’s screenwriting issues rise to the surface early and often. Fly Me to the Moon‘s tone is all over the place. It doesn’t have enough snappy banter between its character to resemble a screwball comedy. Furthermore, it’s painfully slow, to the point where the final 30 minutes, chockful of multiple endings that have characters spelling out their motivations in tedious detail, is bad enough to make you discard any goodwill you harbored for the project.

When you can’t count on a quality Ray Romano side performance — who, sidenote, always looks and acts like he has no idea why he’s in a movie in the first place — to at least salvage an ambitious project, what you’re left with it is a shell of a picture you find yourself remembering for all the elements it could’ve done better.

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jim Rash, Ray Romano, Woody Harrelson, Anna Garcia, Colin Jost, Donald Elise Watkins, and Noah Robbins. Directed by: Greg Berlanti.