Fly Me to the Moon
APPLE TV+
With Fly Me to the Moon, director Greg Berlanti and screenwriter Rose Gilroy attempt to resurrect the screwball comedy on a large scale, and Apple TV giving this star-studded period film a full-fledged theatrical release. Perhaps it doesn’t have the scale of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon or Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. However, comedies like these seldom get released on the big screen anymore, usually reverted to streaming services with little to no fanfare. To have a release like this in a cinema seems like a miracle, even if it’s set up for failure with such a large budget.
The film received a splashy (but uneventful) marketing campaign, alongside plenty of early access screenings to generate buzz and excitement. Unfortunately, there was no buzz to materialize since Sony released horrendous posters and trailers that made the film entirely about one element of the story rather than the blossoming of a romance between marketing specialist “Kelly Jones” (Scarlett Johansson) and NASA mission director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum).
This friction is at the heart of the film after Kelly is assigned by Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) to reshape the brand of NASA, as it’s endured a series of failures. The Apollo 1 pre-launch tragedy has cost the lives of Gus Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee, which Davis feels directly responsible for. With the newly-elected Richard Nixon government now having cold feet over the possibility of the United States beating the Russians on the Moon landing, many senators are in the process of cutting their funding to NASA to divert them locally.
That’s where Kelly comes in: revamp the image of NASA and not to film a faked version of the moon landing in case something goes wrong with Apollo 11. This part occurs after a good hour and fifteen minutes of character development and exposition. It’s also where Fly Me to the Moon is at its most comedic, combining classic slapstick – the Secret Service members playing Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins get tangled in wires and hit each other, for example – with larger-than-life, exuberant side protagonists (Jim Rash plays the fake movie’s flamboyant director). However, it is not what the movie focuses on, but how Kelly begins to feel for Cole, who also feels the same way towards her.
That’s not to say there aren’t any funny moments in the fake moon landing portion of the movie. All of them involve a black cat, who becomes a recurring joke throughout the film but reaches its apex during the fake moon landing, where he’s the catalyst for the funniest slapstick scene of the year. Its staging is highly reminiscent of past Disney films with Kurt Russell or Hayley Mills (how about Robert Stevenson’s That Darn Cat?) and Berlanti is acutely aware of the type of movie he’s making. It’s also why he paints the relationship between Tatum and Johansson’s characters as Gary Cooper/Rock Hudson, Barbara Stanwyck/Doris Day-esque.
Johansson, in particular, seems to channel these two legendary actresses as she creates multiple façades to convince as many senators and interested parties as possible to invest in NASA. It’s also where the film is at its most fun, since Kelly herself is a mystery and has adopted many names throughout her career as an advertising executive. It’s why Harrelson’s Berkus thinks she’s the perfect person to turn this sinking ship around, even if Kelly thinks she’s the wrong person for the job. But as soon as she arrives at NASA and sets her eyes on Cole, it’s where their chemistry fires on all cylinders and pops off the screen in the same way Cooper’s Bertram Potts became infatuated by Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea from the minute she sang “Drum Boogie” in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire.
Tatum may not have been the first choice to portray Cole. Chris Evans was initially cast as the mission director before dropping out of the project due to scheduling conflicts once its initial director, Jason Bateman, left the project and was replaced by Berlanti, who was forced to push the production schedule. And to be perfectly honest, a post-MCU romantic vehicle for Evans and Johansson would have been far more tantalizing than the pairing the audience is ultimately left with, especially considering how Evans hasn’t made anything noteworthy since starring in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.
Tatum is a vastly underappreciated talent and continues to showcase his breadth as a world-class physical comedian and dramatic actor. Of course, anyone who’d seen the 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike films knows this already, but it’s great to see Tatum play someone he’s very comfortable showcasing on screen, especially during a harrowing scene in which he is interviewed by a journalist who pushes him on the responsibility he had on the deaths of Gus Grissom et al. during the Apollo 1 tragedy.
For most of the movie, Cole is restrained in his demeanor (even when hit by an oxygen explosion at the beginning of the film) and physicality. However, in the interview, he feels he has no choice but to stand up to the men he loved so dearly and lash out at a vulturous journalist for pecking into his head when he promised not to do so. The dramatic shift is jarring but purposefully so, and Tatum knows exactly which feelings to bring forward and repress during this jaw-dropping moment of emotional modulation, worthy of his complex turn in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance.
However, Berlanti and Gilroy don’t go deep enough with this character exploration, leaving Cole’s arc unfulfilled by the end. And as much as Tatum knows how to balance two distinct emotional swings, one can’t say the same for its direction of more dramatic reveals, including one where Johansson’s Kelly reveals who she is to Cole. What could’ve been a punch to the gut to the mission director is badly written and delivered, and instead feels like a massive dump of exposition that can’t be imagined by the audience and feels so out of place with the rest of the film’s most natural dialogues.
Then, the runtime gets stretched to interminable heights, and the visual language brought on by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (a frequent collaborator of Ridley Scott) also suffers. What was an otherwise clean film with a rudimentary but functional visual style gets bogged down by the fakest green screen sets you’d ever seen and an overreliance on telephoto lenses to hide it from the audience. Suffice to say, it doesn’t work. The humor also takes a massive step down as Berlanti attempts to figure out exactly where to wrap it up. There are at least three moments in which the film could end but continues until the end credits abruptly appear on screen, arms in the air, letting the audience go after experiencing an uneven movie.
In the second half, Fly Me to the Moon begins to falter as it tries to cram in too many plot revelations that stretch its 132-minute runtime, but the film remains a pleasant time at the cinema. Screwball comedies like these never get made anymore, and one can appreciate Berlanti tipping the hat at the films (and stars) he loves through his electric sense of dynamic physical comedy and the relationship between his two lead stars. Because of this, there’s no denying a film like Fly Me to the Moon feels special, a once-in-a-generation romantic comedy that won’t be made again, since it will be a surefire box office flop. One thing’s for sure, though, Apple knows the theatrical market better than any streamer out there, and the fact that it had a massive release in cinemas should be lauded in the economy we currently live in.