At a moment in American history when rampant conspiracy theories and mass-produced misinformation, sometimes issuing from or tacitly endorsed by those in the highest positions of power, threaten to undermine not only democratic institutions but the concept of truth itself, it’s hard to imagine the pitch meeting for a movie like Fly Me to the Moon. A romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the 1969 Apollo 11 space mission, this leaden caper takes as its premise that the Nixon administration is so anxious to beat Russia in the race to the moon, while retaining the goodwill of the politicians whose votes keep NASA funded, that it’ll do anything to convince the American people of its victory—including, if necessary, making the whole thing up. Still more unfortunately, that high concept—the moon-landing “hoax,” but as a rom-com—is far from this movie’s biggest issue.
It all starts rather innocently. The Nixon administration’s anxieties have also led it to take less drastic measures, such as hiring a slick Madison Avenue ad executive, Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), to build positive publicity around the launch. Kelly travels to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where her ebullience and Marilyn Monroe–esque curves charm everyone in sight—except for the mission’s launch director, Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), a dour, buttoned-up type who’s offended by the idea that something as important as Apollo 11 requires product tie-ins with the likes of Tang breakfast drink in order to earn the public’s respect or the government’s resources. Cole is old-fashioned, serious, and fixated to a fault on the success of the mission, in part because he blames himself for the disaster that killed three astronauts in the failed Apollo 1 mission years before. But when Kelly’s PR work starts to prove successful in attracting both public support and government funds to the project, she and Cole develop a relationship of grudging respect with an undercurrent of slow-burning (if regrettably chemistry-free) attraction.
It’s at this point that Fly Me to the Moon, which was directed by Greg Berlanti (Love, Simon) and written by Rose Gilroy (daughter of writer-director Dan Gilroy and actress Rene Russo), begins to drift into squirm-inducing proximity to our current climate of fevered conspiracy-mongering. A CIA operative named Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), acting on Nixon’s direct orders, strong-arms the reluctant Kelly into collaborating on a secret government project to stage a moon landing in an abandoned NASA hangar. This scheme is necessary, Moe insists, just in case the real Apollo 11 mission goes awry. Rather than release live footage from a tragically failed spaceflight, thus putting the U.S. behind in the Cold War space race and damaging public morale, the government’s plan is to have a backup feed ready to put on air instead as feel-good propaganda.
Subsequent developments render this already ethically shady plan even more nefarious. But the real problem with the fake-moon-landing subplot—leaving aside its flirtation with tinfoil-hatted trutherism—is that it enters the story far too late to create any sense of momentum or suspense. Kelly hires her favorite commercial director (Community’s Jim Rash) to re-create the lunar surface in the hangar and suspend a pair of spacesuit-clad CIA officers on wires to simulate low-gravity lunar conditions. These scenes are meant to play as loopy broad comedy, but their antic mood is undercut by the grimness of the project the fake-landing film crew is manufacturing. Essentially, Kelly has been bullied into spearheading this secret film shoot because Moe has enough dirt on her from her secret con-woman past to threaten her with legal repercussions should she not take part. Not only that, the whole endeavor is in service of a lie that makes a mockery of the life’s work of the thousands of scientists and engineers behind the real space program. Given the queasy moral grounding on which the whole faux-moon-landing subplot rests, it’s impossible to get into the spirit of what seem to be intended as Ed Wood–style comic scenes in which amateur filmmakers pursue their would-be art with incongruous solemnity.
Fly Me to the Moon itself could be described in similar terms. It too is a kind of faux movie, one that seems to proceed on the assumption that putting two high-wattage movie stars in period costume and plonking them down against the backdrop of a well-known historic event (Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon, Walter Cronkite removing his glasses as he tears up on live TV) will be enough to result in a sparkling summertime entertainment. The part of moviemaking that involves creating believable characters with understandable motivations and placing them in situations with meaningful stakes seems to have been skimmed past entirely. This is a movie that expects us to feel awe as we’re gazing upon a real-life rocket launch, then abruptly shift to laughing at the preparations to film a fake one, then pivot to sighing dreamily over a happy-ending kiss between two characters with less spark between them than a pair of action figures smooshed together by a 12-year-old.
Fly Me to the Moon’s foundational silliness could have been compensated for, and maybe even turned into the premise for a lightweight but charming romance, if not for two things: the failure to grapple with the larger historical implications of the fake-moon-landing subplot, and the fatal miscasting of Johansson and Tatum as oil-and-water opposites. Casting Johansson as a hypercompetent professional with a dark con-artist past was not the worst idea. Her combination of lush beauty and keen-eyed pragmatism make her believable as a woman used to rallying whatever resources she has to make her way in an era that, as the movie establishes in a few early scenes, offered women few opportunities for success outside of marriage. But if you’re looking for an actor to play a stolid, repressed engineer who’s consumed by regret, why on earth go with Channing Tatum? Tatum is your guy for boyish exuberance, for mischievous seductions and ill-advised-yet-life-changing road trips. If you want a glum, obsessively focused NASA operations dude, Matt Damon or Ben Affleck or, I don’t know, Jesse Plemons is right there for the casting.
As a big fan of Tatum’s particular brand of on-screen charm, I was frustrated to see his unique set of skills so squandered. There’s even a maddening moment when, invigorated by the success of his underhanded scheme, Harrelson’s Moe Berkus breaks into an impromptu soft-shoe song and dance. How in the world do you cast Tatum, a sensational dancer whose moves have provided some of the most memorable moments of everything from the Step Up movies to the Magic Mike series to the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, and give the fun improvised-dance moment to another character? Tatum’s perpetually grumpy Cole is one of the least appealing elements of Fly Me to the Moon, but I impute this lack of charm only partially to the actor’s performance. Playing a humorless goody-goody with a regulation military haircut (and a passion for short-sleeved knit turtlenecks that seems to far exceed anything he feels for Johansson’s Kelly), Tatum has the unwillingly contained energy of a lion in a cage at the zoo. He’s an actor who needs movement and humor to express what’s inside him. Bottled-up Channing Tatum is no Channing Tatum at all.
Fly Me to the Moon, too, features several fine supporting actors, including Ray Romano as a veteran NASA engineer, who are given far too little to do. (It also features Colin Jost.) But the biggest problem with this ponderous comedy is the lack of balance among the many conflicting tones it aims to strike: awed reverence for the achievements of the 1960s space program; playful enjoyment of the antics on the CIA-controlled fake-moon-landing movie set; heartfelt sympathy with the leading characters’ formulaic and too-late-revealed backstories; and swoony identification with their thinly established romance. Being expected to feel whatever emotion is required on demand has a curious way of leaving you feeling nothing at all. There are some things that just can’t be faked.
