Apollo 11's 1969 flight was the most exciting event of my young life. I made a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine articles charting the entire journey, starting months before the mission launched. I grew up in the town that was the home of Grumman Aircraft, which built the lunar module that landed on the moon. As a result, we were the first people in the world to see the moon rocks.
Growing up at that time, anything seemed possible technologically for our country, that we could achieve the impossible. The entire NASA program inspired hope at a time of great political and cultural division and a war.
I wish "Fly Me to the Moon," (Apple Films, now in theaters, will stream on Apple + TV next month) had conveyed more of the excitement, adventure, and idealism of that Apollo era and less of the cynicism and conspiracy, which seem more indicative of our time. And while there are some virtues in "Fly" worth celebrating, beginning with a great blastoff, ultimately the final landing is rather bumpy and doesn't quite stick.
Moon marketing
It's late 1968 and shady duplicitous government operative Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), under the newly elected President Nixon, taps wily New York ad agency creative director whiz and amoral huckster Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), to commandeer the public relations and marketing campaign for NASA to drum up fading public interest and boost its popularity after being sidelined by the Vietnam War. If she refuses, Berkus threatens to expose all the lies and cons that's built up her lucrative career.
Jones has to convince dour, obsessive, straight-shooting NASA launch director and former Air Force fighter pilot Cole Davis (the reliably hunky wooden Channing Tatum) to give her the go ahead. At first turned off to her unsavory antics, such as falsifying scientist's biographies and recruiting actors to impersonate NASA employees, she wins him over due to her successes of getting the astronauts huge publicity (TV shows, magazine covers) and branding with product endorsements (Tang, Fruit of the Loom underwear, Omega watches). He's haunted by guilt over the 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed the three-astronaut crew, as he was the launch director of that tragic aborted mission.
Jones brings along her sassy younger assistant (Anna Garcia) with countercultural vibes ("I will never trust Richard Nixon"). They try to schmooze a visiting senator, so he will vote to provide more funding for NASA, leading to a hilarious cameo by "Saturday Night Live" news co-anchor Colin Jost, real-life husband of Johansson.
Then Berkus returns with a new order to Kelly that she must engineer a secret government contingency plan to stage a fake moon landing on a soundstage in an abandoned NASA hangar. The government is paranoid that if the real Apollo Mission fails or ends disastrously, it would damage public morale and result in us potentially losing the space race with the Russians.
Lost in space
Jones brings in gay ad director Lance Vespertine (Jim Rash) to film it and must convince Berkus who's there, into believing a fake transmission is occurring when it's not, after Jones changes her mind about being complicit in this hare-brained scheme. The swishy Rash caricature provides humor in that era's flamboyant style a la Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, performers whom everyone knew was gay, but were never publicly acknowledged.
Thwarted romance
Rather than the romance of space, we witness a thwarted romance going on between Jones and Davis, after their initial attraction at a diner before he knows she's been hired by NASA. We wouldn't call the chemistry combustible. It's more fizzle than sizzle, barely serviceable mainly due to Johansson.
However, the first half hour of the film is delightfully reminiscent of late 1930s screwball romance comedies ("Bringing Up Baby," "His Girl Friday") with sparkling, crackling dialogue. Then the ludicrous CIA plot unhinges the second half of the film, leading to a convoluted narrative that dilutes the Jones/Davis romance, rendering it almost a distraction.
This is one of those movies that's trying to do too much. It's nostalgia, a conspiracy caper, a cheeky romcom, a slapstick comedy of errors, and suspense drama, but none of these descriptions are developed sufficiently so the final product feels incomplete, lacks coherence, resulting in weird tonal shifts.
The whole fake moon landing theme is not new, as there were theories in the 1970s that famed director Stanley Kubrick had filmed what we thought we saw on our televisions, that the entire Apollo program was a NASA hoax. The 1977 film "Capricorn One" faked the first manned mission to Mars. Inadvertently, such nonsense mocks the dedication of the scores of scientists, engineers, and control room workers, who dedicated their lives and talents to the space program.
Basically "Fly Me to the Moon" is an overlong, overwritten clunky screenplay (by Rose Gilroy) in an overproduced movie with too many subplots. Johansson (also the executive producer) gives a winning, perky, effervescent performance bequeathing the film some pizazz. The movie features a sterling aesthetic production design, so you feel as though you are genuinely living through the 1960s, breezily recreated by gay director Greg Berlanti ("Love, Simon").
The optimistic, can-do attitude of NASA, in one of humankind's greatest achievements, is replaced with today's sardonic over-reliance on marketing and QAnon mentality. It runs out of fuel by the time it reaches the climax. Even the actual launch of Apollo 11 here lacks the essential 'butterflies in your stomach' suspense, that the superior 2016 "Hidden Figures" film, about early 1960s NASA, enjoyed in spades.
Still, "Fly Me to the Moon" is a rare example of an adult middle-of-the-road movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore, so I don't want to be too discouraging. While it won't send you into orbit, it's an intermittently charming diversion, a pleasant throwback flight, as long as you don't start asking too many questions.
www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals
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