Greg Berlanti (2024)

Peter Howell in the Toronto Star says that Fly Me to the Moon is ‘tonally all over the place’.  The opening titles sequence gives a hint of what he means.  A montage of news film clips briskly summarises the history of the space race, from the Soviet Union’s first Sputnik launch in October 1957 to early 1969, when Richard Nixon moved into the Oval Office with plans to reduce NASA funding.  The montage includes some jokey bits and a beaming Yuri Gagarin but serious stuff predominates.  As well as Nixon, there’s John F Kennedy (‘this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth’); a long-haired young man explaining that America needs to sort things out closer to home before exploring space; a grim-faced newscaster reporting the Apollo 1 tragedy.  Yet the voiceover narrating this introduction is jocose.  It’s joined on the soundtrack by Sam Cooke singing ‘The Best Things in Life are Free’ (‘The moon belongs to everyone …’).  It’s as if the various archive material can all be wrapped in fuzzy, genial reminiscence because it’s safely in the past.

Written by Rose Gilroy, Greg Berlanti’s romcom stars Scarlett Johansson (also one of the film’s producers) and Channing Tatum.  She’s Kelly Jones, a super-smart Madison Avenue advertising executive; he’s Cole Davis, NASA’s buttoned-down launch director.  Fly Me to the Moon has been likened to the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  It’s true that Johansson is so radiantly confident and competent that she seems to be mimicking, and she more than emulates, Doris Day’s annoyingness.  Rock Hudson wasn’t the greatest actor but, at least as Day’s partner, he was charming, a quality signally lacking in Tatum’s straight-man stooge.  The plot beyond the romance involves Kelly’s being drafted in to give NASA an urgently-needed PR boost to convince the White House that the Apollo programme should proceed.  She’s then charged to film a fake moon landing in case the actual Apollo 11 mission fails.  This premise seems designed to please everyone:  the idea that the moon landing didn’t really happen is debunked but conspiracy theorists are consoled that it would have been faked had the occasion demanded.

I walked out well before the end so I can’t say that Peter Howell is wrong about the tonal confusion.  I can only say that, once the narrative gets underway, the intro’s blandly nostalgic feel morphs into something worse – smirking (unmerited) self-satisfaction:  the film exudes this so consistently that I started to wish it were ‘all over the place’.  Its only enjoyable feature is costume designer Mary Zophres’s sixties outfits, which Scarlett Johansson wears with aplomb.  Otherwise, the most evocative thing is the picture’s budget.  Plenty of people used to deplore the vast expense of space exploration.  One hundred million dollars were wasted on the abominable Fly Me to the Moon.

16 July 2024