Fly Me to the Moon—a relatively benign, intermittently charming, historically based romantic dramedy centered around the 1969 Apollo 11 mission—might go down as one of the last attempts to make a movie for the monoculture, or at least general theatrical audiences. Its fate, I suspect, will be the same as that of The Fall Guy, a somewhat similar project from this year: middling box-office returns and a swift demotion to streaming. (Apple Studios is one of the producers.)
I wish I could rage against that fate in defense of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, but Fly Me to the Moon, directed by Greg Berlanti from a script by Rose Gilroy, doesn’t exactly inspire such strong emotions. Channing Tatum plays NASA launch director Cole Davis, a straight arrow who bristles when fast-and-loose-with-the-truth advertising executive Kelly Jones, played by Scarlett Johansson, comes aboard to reignite public enthusiasm for the moon mission.
Tatum and Johansson are fun enough together, though much of the chemistry could be contributed to their lively period costumes. She has a wide array of mod dresses and skirt suits, while he sticks with one fitted, short-sleeve sweater in a variety of primary colors—likely to distinguish him from the button-down nerds in white who otherwise dominate the screen. Together, they’re like crayons who have been melted down and then poured into idealized, masculine-feminine molds.
As a narrative, Fly Me to the Moon mostly perks up when Kelly is tasked by Woody Harrelson’s shadowy government agent to produce and film a fake moon landing as backup in case the real mission fails—allowing the movie to riff on a long-standing, long-debunked conspiracy theory. This is supposed to be a critical point of contention between Kelly and Cole just as their relationship has turned romantic, but it’s more interesting as a commentary on our deepfake moment. (Recall that just this year Johansson accused OpenAI of imitating her voice in a demo for one of its artificial-intelligence programs.) Fly Me to the Moon, a breezily farcical variation on Apollo 11 history in which the truth prevails, is a time-capsule curiosity—marking a movie landscape that’s slowly fading, alongside our ability to tell fact from fiction in media of all kinds.
(7/14/2024)
