You can just imagine what the sales pitch for this movie sounded like. “Hey, let’s do a rom-com, set against the moon shot in 1969! And as a bonus, we’ll speculate, with tongue in cheek, about the fabled conspiracy theory that the whole thing was fake!”
Scarlett Johansson plays Kelly Jones, a New York advertising prodigy who’s brought in to sell the space program, in an era when the country is shaken by civil unrest and Vietnam.
Her methods include recruiting the astronauts to sell Tang and wristwatches, and having NASA engineers replaced on TV by more attractive stand-ins. This doesn’t sit well with hard-nosed launch director Cole Davis (played by Channing Tatum.)
The pair are like water and oil (or rather, rocket fuel.) But in classic Tracy and Hepburn fashion, they’ve also fallen for each other at first sight.
They develop a certain mutual respect, and we find out that they both have baggage. Cole carries guilt feelings for the 1967 launchpad fire that killed astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee. And Kelly’s background is hiding even more fakery than you’d expect from an ad executive in the 1960’s.
Director Greg Berlanti and the film’s three writers don’t seem to find much drama or suspense in the actual history. Hey, we know what happened, right?
The plot twist (and romantic complication) comes when Kelly’s shadowy government handler (played by Woody Harrelson) orders her to commandeer a sound stage right under NASA’s nose to film a fake landing. And the “contingency plan” threatens to upstage the heroism of the actual flight.
A prima donna ad director (humorously played by Jim Rash) is put in charge of the production. Kelly grumbles that they should have hired Stanley Kubrick—an in-jokey reference to the urban legend that the “Shining’ director actually collaborated on the hoax.
The movie and the two stars are certainly likable. (Johansson in particular seems to be having a good time.)
But this moon rocket seems to be powered mostly on fluff. The movie is still overshadowed by the two classic films on the space program--“The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13.”
“Fly Me to the Moon” comes up with three blasts on a scale of five.
