Much as we want space exploration to be all about the giant leaps for mankind, a lot of it is about the small steps of men. Fly Me To the Moon wants it to be about the small steps, hopes you will believe its giant leaps, and makes a hard landing somewhere in the middle.
There is a lot going on in this film about the Apollo 11 Mission, including rising American public – and hence political – apathy about spending so much to get to the Moon, coupled with anger against the government over the Vietnam War; a romance that never feels right except for the fact that ‘why waste two good-looking actors’; a CIA-type scheming that suggests ‘why not have one with Harrelson around’; and abundant jibes at Richard Nixon (in comparison with John F Kennedy) for Republicans to scream blue murder in this election season.
Yet, in the beginning, the film based on an original story looks like it will almost pull it off. With the Congress increasingly reluctant to keep the funds going to send a man to the Moon – a promise originally made by the aforesaid Kennedy – the US government in the shadowy form of Moe (Harrelson) hires a hot-shot marketing professional called Kelly (Johansson) to sell the Mission to the masses.
This goes against all that the straight-as-an-arrow Mission Director Cole (Tatum) stands for, who sneers at the “lying”, the “pretence”, the brand tie-ins, and the fact that “people putting their lives on the line” would need marketing to be sold to Americans. “Boy, you don’t know much about Americans, do you?” Kelly quips.
Of course, Cole and Kelly’s worlds clash. However, the film doesn’t go either/or in this too, letting the two just gently bounce off each other, much like astronauts on the powdery Moon surface. So they orbit around each other, having declared their attraction very early on, getting down finally to a kiss when everyone is tired of their little games.
Meanwhile, the plot spins into an entirely new and dark (if the film thought hard about it) trajectory. On its own, focused just on this part, it isn’t necessarily a bad story threat. However, the film wants us to accept it as just another blip in Kelly’s long – and dubious, we are repeatedly told by Moe – career path and let it pass.
The thing is that as Kelly herself says when taking the job, “Everybody loves the Moon.” The film flashes signs of its wonder at Apollo 11’s Mission too, letting drop that the NASA building at Kennedy Center is “the tallest single-storey building in the world”, or that Cole and his men are doing “the most difficult thing done ever”, or how the Moon’s dark spots are called the Seas, and how the perfect landing spot was found.
And yet, ultimately, the way the story goes, the wonder seems just a cynical tool, on the path to a very pedestrian love. It’s even more criminal when you think the couple who lie at the heart of this love story – the otherwise luminous Johansson, who is lost to layers of caked make-up; and the otherwise magnetic Tatum, damped down to mundanity.
Fly Me To The Moon movie director: Greg Berlanti
Fly Me To The Moon movie cast: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Jim Rash, Anna Garcia
Fly Me To The Moon movie rating: 2.5 stars
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