PG-13 2024 ‧ Romance/Comedy ‧ 2h 11m
Fly Me To The Moon is set during the 1960s space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The stakes were high because the fate of the geo-political world rested on the fate of which superpower would prove superior. With the Soviets successful with the first satellite and the first human in space, the U.S. was under great pressure to leapfrog the Russians to get the first humans on the moon.
Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is a whip-smart marketer who can spin anything. At first, President Nixon’s office hired her to sell NASA to America. Then, with the moon landing fast approaching, they expand her responsibilities to include secretly staging a fake moon landing that can be broadcast instead of the real moon landing so they don’t have to worry about any technical difficulties broadcasting from the moon.
Channing Tatum plays Cole Davis, a fighter pilot who got scrubbed as an astronaut due to a heart issue and is now a part of Apollo 11 mission control. He is a no-nonsense military man who doesn’t appreciate how Kelly Jones’ efforts disrupt mission preparations.
In some aspects Fly Me To The Moon plays like Hidden Figures; it shines a spotlight on forgotten people who played an integral role in the success of the Apollo program, putting men on the moon, and bringing them home safely. This is also the biggest problem I have with this movie. Unlike Hidden Figures, this story is fiction. Jones and Davis are made up and their story is woven into actual historic events. I’m a huge space nut so I knew what parts of the story were true and which ones weren’t but the movie doesn’t make that distinction; what’s real and what’s not are all muddled together. Fly Me To The Moon uses the real deaths of the three astronauts in the Apollo 1 tragedy to add emotional depth to propel the story, but by doing so manages to cheapen their deaths by dragging them into the fiction.
On the surface, there is nothing “wrong” with this movie. Johansson and Tatum are pleasant. Woody Harrelson does a nice job as a secret operative for Nixon’s office. However, I don’t think the film succeeds in finding a reason to exist. The movie creates fake heroes in a time and place filled with countless real heroes with stories to be told. That alone was a strike against it. Another strike was a third-act meltdown that was tonally off with some screwball comedy involving a cat. Overall, this would be decent to fold laundry to, but don’t bother seeing it in the theater.
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