Star-powered Apollo 11 rom-com loses propulsion

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This article was published 12/07/2024 (544 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the head of NASA public relations in this astro-themed rom-com, Scarlett Johansson is looking just swell in clamdiggers and pencil skirts. As the Apollo 11 launch director, Channing Tatum is working the formfitting Orlon knitwear.

Not only do these two make a ridiculously good-looking couple, they also offer crack comic timing and loads of unforced charm and screen presence, making this 1960s-set rom-com something of an old-school star vehicle.

Kelly Jones is all about selling the space program to the American public, even if that means getting a little “creative” with the truth. Cole Davis is a clean-cut straightshooter who wants to keep the focus on the science and the mission.

That’s rocket fuel for romance, and the badinage between these two workplace adversaries is sharp and fast-talking, recalling those vintage screwball comedies where grown-up professional men and women spar and spark.

Unfortunately, unlike the Apollo 11 mission, the film struggles with the landing. After a zippy beginning, scripted by rookie screenwriter Rose Gilroy and directed by veteran TV producer Greg Berlanti, Fly Me to the Moon’s second half feels drawn-out and needlessly complicated. (A ’40s flick would have wrapped this up briskly by the 92-minute mark.)

There’s something to be said for rom-com leads who have something to do besides fall in love. Work is often perfunctory in the romance genre, with the characters’ jobs — as cupcake bakers, as artisanal cheesemakers, as architects who do nothing but carry around cardboard tubes — treated as accessories.

Fly Me to the Moon wants to go a little deeper. We start with a montage of the Soviet-American Space Race and JFK’s optimistic 1961 promise to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.

We then move to the late ’60s, a darker time when support for the space program is faltering and many people are, understandably, more concerned with problems here on Earth.

Kelly is doing everything she can to get the faces of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins out there, doing deals with Omega watches, Corvette convertibles and Tang (“more vitamin C than orange juice!”). With renewed public interest, Kelly points out, comes leverage for funding.

Cole disapproves. He wants to concentrate on the actual work. It’s a faceoff between hard science and soft persuasion, and at the start, it’s fun and sexy.

The story’s focus on its Cape Canaveral setting takes a weirdly dark turn, though, when Woody Harrelson drops in as Moe Berkus. Similar to a role Harrelson played in White House Plumbers, the shadowy Moe is a dirty trickster for U.S. president Richard Nixon. (Could Fly Me to the Moon be part of the Watergate Extended Universe?)

Moe agrees with Kelly that televised images of the moon landing could bring together a divided and dispirited nation. But he goes further: Moe needs “the Americans to beat the Russians on TV,” and that’s why he wants faked backup footage in case anything goes wrong with the real event.

Kelly is tasked with replicating the lunar mission, which involves a massive secret soundstage and some broad but very funny work from Community’s Jim Rash as a bitchy, temperamental director.

There’s some tonal weirdness here. For its first half, the story is powered by sincere awe for the Apollo space program and peppy enthusiasm for NASA engineers in their short-sleeved white dress shirts and pocket protectors. It finds some serious undertones in Cole’s trauma from the deadly failure of the Apollo 1 mission.

In contrast, the second half detours into a semi-satirical subplot that’s a boon to conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked and NASA is a front. (No doubt there are already memes about how “Hollywood HIDES It ALL in Plain Sight.”) The script even makes some sly references to Stanley Kubrick, a nod to the sub-conspiracy-theory that The Shining is his coded confession to shooting phony lunar footage.

Either approach might have worked, but taken together they drag down the comic and romantic momentum, lead ing to a stalled-out conclusion. Truth, science and, of course, love might eventually triumph, but viewers could find the final fireworks to be a bit of a letdown.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com