Fly Me to the Moon’s Charm Shines a Light on its Surprising Teeth

Channing Tatum doesn’t dance in Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon. That’s a shame since the good Mr. Tatum can dance—on the floor, on a pole, just about anywhere really. But Fly Me to the Moon does know how to use his grace and physical control as a key building block in the construction of NASA Flight Director Cole Davis. 

Cole’s rigid, because that’s what NASA needs in its Flight Director. He’s the one who makes sure that everyone does their job so that everyone goes home alive—whether that means stopping a gas leak (and walking off an explosion) or octuple-checking every component of and step in what will become Apollo 11. Beyond his passion for space and care for his NASA peers, Cole’s drive is personal—he was there when Apollo 1’s command module caught fire, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. He’d sooner burn himself to ash than let that happen again.

The trick is that, while Cole is exactly the person you’d want to run an undertaking as ludicrously complex as an Apollo flight, he’s just about the last person you’d want to sell a ludicrously complex—and thus ludicrously expensive—project like Apollo 11 to a skeptical public and an antsy congress. Enter (at the behest of Woody Harrelson’s shady government operative Moe Berkus) ace New York adwoman Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson). 

Where Cole looks at Apollo and sees everything that needs to happen for it to happen, Kelly looks at Apollo and sees how she can spin sponsorships for it. Astronauts drink Tang. Snap, Crackle, and Pop can sub out for Neil, Buzz, and Mike. And, aside from being a beautiful luxury item, Omega makes damn good watches—a legitimately vital tool on a mission where every second counts. It starts as a job, one Kelly’s strong-armed into taking. It becomes something she didn’t know she was looking for—an opportunity to do genuine good, to be one of the hands carrying humanity towards the stars.

Cole and Kelly’s physical attraction is immediately evident to both following a lightly charred meet cute. Their emotional attraction is a thornier matter—Cole is so duty-bound that he won’t let himself see beyond the mission, while Kelly is so committed to her certainty that hustling is how she gets by that she struggles to view the world as anything but transactional. Fly Me to the Moon’s greatest strength is Johansson and Tatum’s chemistry. They blend their shared sexual attraction with frustration over their mutual but distinct stubbornness, as well as their growing care for each other and recognition of who the other makes them want to be. Cole wants to channel his passion for space into life outside the mission. Kelly wants to be part of something real, to connect with people beyond selling things to them. It’s sweet, fun work.

Where Fly Me to the Moon gets twisty is Berkus. A hardline Cold Warrior and an all-around sneering jackass who cares more about one-upping the USSR than human accomplishment, he twists Kelly’s arm to get her to fake the landing. Apollo 11 will fly. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins will go to the Moon. They’ll even film it. But what do the people of the world see? That’s too powerful an image to leave to chance. For the sake of U.S. victory in the Cold War, the moon landing the world sees will be an intricately crafted fraud. While Kelly could hypothetically say no, Moe’s got parts of her past she does not want to be brought to the present hanging over her Damocles-style. Thus, with the help of her assistant (Anna Garcia) and a talented but terminally obnoxious director (Jim Rash), Kelly sets out to bring Moe’s conspiracy to life—all while Apollo lights a spark in her she didn’t know she needed lit, and she grows closer to Cole.

While the would-be-fake moon landing has its comic moments (it turns out that faceless government goons are not the best ensemble to cast from, never mind figuring out how to convincingly fake a location they can only know so much about until they get there), Fly Me to the Moon’s primary use for the scheme is dramatic. It’s a betrayal—of the public, of NASA in general, of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins specifically, and, most personally for Kelly, of Cole.

Fly Me to the Moon’s understanding that its wacky scheme is more sinister than goofy gives it some welcome teeth. Like Air, this isn’t a revolutionary polemic disguised as a charming picture. It’s still the product of a powerful studio that aims to make money and sell things. But, also like Air, acknowledging the limit of its bite doesn’t mean that it’s ineffectual. Narratively, it brings stakes and scale and weight to Fly Me to the Moon’s climax, where Berlanti and company successfully interweave social stakes (whether Moe will hoodwink the world in the name of Nixon) with personal stakes (whether Kelly and Cole’s relationship will survive) to build tension and even some thrills.

Metatextually, Fly Me to the Moon’s climax argues for the vitality of truth, of history. Apollo 11 would not have gone the way it went without everything that came before it, from the Apollo 1 disaster to Apollo 10’s toast to Charles Schulz. History breathes, actions have consequences, and manipulating the truth is a really great way to jump into a shark’s mouth. It’s a welcome point.

Plus, on a purely petty level, it’s nice to get a movie about the Space Race that pays attention to its human cost after the bizarre, mean-spirited running gags about astronauts being idiots and Apollo 1’s crew being idiots who died badly in Jerry Seinfeld’s baleful Unfrosted earlier this year. That still baffles me.

All told? Fly Me to the Moon is a charmer. Johansson and Tatum work well together, and the Space Race setting gives it some enjoyable bite. It’s a good time.

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