In “Fly Me to the Moon,” a shiny, tinny hunk of speculative fiction with a lunar dust sprinkling of fact, Channing Tatum plays the NASA launch director in charge of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission. But it’s Scarlett Johansson, as the Madison Avenue wizard selling that mission to the American public, who emerges as this movie’s real launch director.
She has an ear for this stuff, and this “Mad Man”-adjacent era — the brio and energy, an easy facility with dialects (her character’s a born deceiver) and an instinct for navigating the story’s whiplash transitions from screwball to pathos to patter to angst to aggressively chaste romance. In theory, Tatum is along for the ride to provide the “va” in conjunction with Johansson’s “voom.” But he seems lost here, and in any case is not really your man for quippy, fast-moving banter of any quality. The stars’ chemistry feels tentative to the point of the opposite of liftoff: driftoff.
Miraculously, Johansson salvages whole flaming chunks of director Greg Berlanti’s rom-com/political conspiracy/faked-moon-landing hybrid. Going for laughs one minute, solemn heartbreak the next, it’s a movie about advertising and the ethical limits of deceiving the public in the name of space-racing against the Russians. “Fly Me to the Moon” is also a movie about the narrative limits of cramming six movies into one, and the challenge of selling a luxe period romance (production budget: a reported $100 million, much of it going to star salaries) without blatant deception regarding what “Fly Me to the Moon” is, and isn’t.
Here’s the fact part. The real NASA, clouded by the 1967 test launch fatalities incurred by the Apollo 1 disaster, turned around its public image and wavering political support with the help of public relations and marketing consultants. Screenwriter Rose Gilroy takes it from there, ginning up a push/pull attraction between Johansson’s glamorous Kelly Jones and Tatum’s straight-arrow Cole Davis. Jones more or less takes over the Apollo 11 project, in the weeks leading up to the summer ‘69 launch, with her aide-de-camp (Anna Garcia) in tow. Kelly has been recruited for the assignment by a shadowy government operator (Woody Harrelson) who is all too aware of her shady, blackmail-able past.