FLY ME TO THE MOON (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Fly Me to the Moon, Columbia Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 11, 2024

No one has been to the moon in more than half a century. The financial cost was deemed too high, and for all the feelings of pride and unity that came with two humans stepping foot on the lunar surface in 1969, people became increasingly disinterested in the prospect with each successive mission. The best parts of Fly Me to the Moon, which eventually becomes an amusing piece of speculative history and a less-than-engaging romance, address the reality that the notion of human accomplishment and scientific discovery might not be enough of a selling point for some people, while also making a solid case that maybe they should be.

It's a shame, really, about everything else surrounding those ideas in Rose Gilroy's screenplay. They're not misguided or terrible pieces of this story, which sets two characters, with different philosophies of why landing human beings on the moon is a worthwhile endeavor, at odds with each other until they find some middle ground.

One is Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the launch director at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, who has been with NASA's space program since at least the Apollo 1 tragedy. He's a man who wanted to become an astronaut and now finds himself doing the next best thing—overseeing the goal of getting astronauts off the ground and out of Earth's atmosphere. For him, it's all about the mission and its variously lofty aims.

The other is Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), an advertising expert with a mysterious past, who is pulled into NASA's orbit to market Apollo 11. For her, it's another job, not unlike her introductory scene, in which she tries to sell some automobile executives that seatbelts could be a key to selling a sports car. That Kelly pretends to be a pregnant wife in order to make herself more sympathetic and her case more personal at gets another distinction between these two. Kelly lies as part of her profession, and Cole seems physically unable to even mildly deceive, even when it might benefit the program and his own conscience.

The dynamic between these two characters is intriguing, especially against the backdrop of NASA's race to get astronauts to the moon before the Soviet Union can get any of their cosmonauts there. After all, what was the Space Race or, for that matter, the Cold War, if not some kind of governmental and philosophical brand of marketing with plenty of real-world consequences for better and for ill?

It's easy enough to admire both of these characters for different reasons. Cole believes in the ideal of the Apollo program as a potential accomplishment for the history books of humankind, and as played by Tatum, he's achingly sincere in those beliefs. Johansson, meanwhile, plays Kelly, not with any sort of conniving motives, but with a belief in pure practicality. Her job is to get money flowing to NASA and Apollo 11 on the minds of as many members of the American public as possible, and if that means the astronauts have to re-schedule training to pose with expensive watches and cars as part of assorted sponsorship deals, so be it.

It cheapens the material that this stand-off almost inevitably leads to a romance between Cole and Kelly, if only because the rest of the movie is approaching much bigger ideas and even the two actors don't seem entirely convinced of that direction. Tatum and Johansson are two incredibly good-looking and charming actors, of course, which means a romantic connection between their characters would seem like an easy win for the movie. It's not, though, because that love story is treated as almost some kind of requirement. Their characters are more interesting an individual people than as some forced checkbox on a list of things a movie has to possess.

The professional tension between Cole and Kelly is far more involving, anyway. Cole goes about his day-to-day work of organizing the most ambitious project in all of human history, and as pragmatically necessary as they are, Kelly's demands of the crew to make sure that project is funded properly keep getting in the way. Director Greg Berlanti sets this conflict against a most-persuasive backdrop of the Space Center of the era (so much so that he seamlessly includes some archival footage of the preparation for the launch and the day itself), and Gilroy's screenplay has some fun with the politics of the period, as the program receives pushback from assorted U.S. Senators in need of very different arguments against their objections.

Arguably, the biggest plot point for the story eventually becomes one of those political players. He's the enigmatic Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), who hires Kelly at the behest of Richard Nixon and later comes up with a scheme to ensure the mission's success—at least on television—no matter what happens in reality. The climactic sequence becomes a clever subversion of a conspiracy theory (that, somehow, still persists), mainly because the logistics of the plan are so ludicrous that it's impossible for them to succeed.

That's primarily why the romance fails here, because it's unnecessary and deflates the ambitions of everything else Fly Me to the Moon tries to accomplish. It simplifies these characters, these ideas, and these conflicts to something that's probably easier to market but sells its own potential short.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products