Fly Me to the Moon
A decently entertaining alternate history rom-com that over-complicates itself out of being a better movie.
Full Disclosure: I didn’t even know that this movie existed until about a week ago. Then I heard it was opening this weekend, saw one preview and decided to check it out. All I really understood from the preview and tag line is that it seemed to be a story about people faking the moon landing. That’s quite a bit less knowledge than I usually having entering the theater.
Review
I will admit to a bit of trepidation entering this movie, given my limited knowledge of its subject matter. Conspiracy theories are far too prevalent these days, and so I’m always a little worried that this kind of story will just feed into more conspiratorial bullshit. My hope is that people will just watch this as escapist summer fun. In that vein, this was a relatively entertaining, light-hearted movie, but one which could probably have been better if that had just stuck to a more straight-forward story about people working on the NASA moon landing project.
The movie opens on Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), a 60s ad exec as she demonstrates that she’s at the top of her game, being able to stretch the truth and manipulate people in order to sell whatever she’s pitching. She’s approached by a government operative named Moe (Woody Harrelson) who wants her to help promote the space program, following years of declining public interest.
These first few scenes are straight out of a less serious version of Mad Men, right down to “Kelly Jones” actually being a fake identity for Johansson’s character, in full Don Draper style. But after Kelly is recruited and flies down to Cape Canaveral with her trusty assistant, Anna, the movie essentially turns into a rom-com.
Johansson and Tatum are a pretty watchable couple as they perform their “will-they, won’t-they” bit for most of the first half of the movie.
The first evidence of this is a classic rom-com meet cute between Kelly and Channing Tatum’s NASA Launch Director character, Cole Davis, that happens in a diner the night before they actually officially meet at work and realize that they’re supposed to be colleagues. The diner scene is actually fairly sweet and well done, and gives us a sense of how the rest of the movie is going to go…up to a point. There’s your usual scenes of the two characters annoying each other at work, despite their initial flirtation and attraction when they didn’t know who the other one was, filled with “will they-won’t they” tension.
At heart this is a love story, and I actually really liked that part of the movie. It’s about two people with very different priorities, and both with their own past demons to overcome, discovering that they ultimately have the same goal. For Kelly, she’s trying to get the public excited about NASA again, in the lead up to the Apollo 11 launch, even if she has to lie and manipulate to get it, disturbing Cole’s precisely ordered workspace in the process. She also directly has to overcome her criminal past and fake identities because they’re being used by Moe to blackmail her, and her manipulation of others is a defence mechanism because of her rocky childhood.
Meanwhile Cole, still haunted by the deaths of the astronauts of the Apollo 1 disaster, which he oversaw, is laser-focussed on ensuring that everything with Apollo 11 goes according to plan, and doesn’t think he has time for Kelly’s distractions – media interviews with his staff, product endorsements, meetings with Senators, etc.
All of this works quite well, and had the movie just stuck to this story, I think it would actually have been a better movie. The on-screen chemistry between Johansson and Tatum is pretty good. I’ll give most of the credit for that to Johansson though, as she’s so good she could probably have chemistry with a crash test dummy. It’s when the movie brings in the idea of faking the moon landing that this film kind of loses its way. It feels a bit as though the filmmakers had a nice rom-com, but decided that they weren’t sure they could sell a period rom-com, and so they decided to tack on the faked moon landing part to give the movie a better pitch.
The idea for faking the moon landing comes from Moe, of course, as the resident shadowy government operative, and doesn’t show up until well into the second half of the movie. Even though from that part on it dominates the rest of the story (more on that in the spoilers section below), it sort of unnecessarily complicates what had been a good story about two people set against the backdrop of a historic event. So while the movie was mostly entertaining, I can’t help but think that the filmmakers got in their own way by trying to make the film something more.
Spoilers Ahead
Once Woody Harrelson’s character really gets involved in the movie with a ridiculous plan, the whole story begins to fall apart.
Once Moe forces Kelly to adopt the plan of trying to fake the moon landing on a remote sound stage at Cape Canaveral, a plan that she’s supposed to hide from Cole and everyone else that actually works at NASA there are a bunch of scenes that are supposed to be funny about stereotypical Hollywood types bumbling about trying to make a movie set of the moon and using government agents as actors. Unfortunately most of these scenes just come across as comedically forced and annoying, probably because they take away from the story that we’ve been enjoying up to that point.
Once Kelly and her assistant start feeling bad about the con they’re perpetrating, and NASA seems to be getting closer to a successful launch, she confronts Moe, only to be told that his plan was always to go ahead with the fake in order to “control the narrative” or some bullshit, and unveils a complicated strategy whereby they’ll use the audio feed from the real NASA mission, but combine it with Kelly’s movie set images.
Not much of that makes any sense. It’s never really clear why the White House wanted to go ahead with the fake if they were still using the same audio. If the goal was to trick the public if something went wrong, wouldn’t the public also clue in pretty quickly if the astronauts suddenly started screaming “mayday!” into their headsets?
In the end it doesn’t matter because Kelly finally confides everything to Cole, including her criminal past, and the rest of the movie becomes about 20 minutes of Kelly, Cole, and a few NASA scientists trying NOT to fake the movie landing, even while they’re successfully doing it, but convincing Moe that they’ve adhered to his instructions along the way. If this sounds like a bizarre story construction for a movie, you’re not wrong.
Everything is eventually revealed to Moe through the use of Chekov’s cat, a feline intruder to Cape Canaveral that keeps popping up eventually throughout the movie, finally making an appearance on Kelly’s movie set and spilling the beans to Moe the horrible truth that he’s been duped and has been watching (along with the world) footage of the actual moon landing. But he’s not that upset, so…yay, I guess? It’s just a weird ending.
The folks at NASA, trying very hard NOT to fake the moon landing. Yeah, you read that right. The ending of the movie doesn’t make much sense.
5 Quick Hits
Obviously I never lived during the 60s, but the costumes just felt very realistic and lived-in for the time period. I don’t often shout out costume departments, but this one felt like it deserved some praise.
There were some humorous moments throughout the film, but I definitely laughed the hardest at a cameo appearance by Colin Jost as a Cold War hawk US Senator that was just stupid enough to be believable. Good stuff.
I felt they could have done more with Harrelson’s character. Aside from his bizarre overall plan, he was too basic. A hatchet man for Nixon could have been more bumbling, or gone the other way and been more menacing. Moe was just in the boring middle.
Ray Romano, who played the assistant launch director, seems to have found a good post-TV career of playing side characters in movies that end of having heart-to-heart talks with the main characters. It’s a good role for him, and he does it well.
The early parts of this movie at NASA, with its humorous tone, somehow managed to re-glamourize the moon landing. It was fun to see it depicted in film this way, since almost every other story about it tries to make it seem like this grand epic endeavour. This movie, with its detail about the youth of many of the scientists working on the project, seemed to humanize the whole experience in a fun way.
