Fly Me to the Moon (Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano) – Someone thought this was a good idea. Fifty-plus years after the first moon landing, some studio executive at Apple greenlit a project to tell us about the Apollo 11 mission from the standpoint of an over-aggressive ad executive working for one of Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters to fake the moon landing in case the real mission fails.
Now that I wrote that, it sounds even dumber. For some reason, Scarlett Johansson – one of the biggest stars in the world – agreed to star as Kelly Jones and serve as a producer of the film. Almost-star Channing Tatum plays the male hunk flight director, Cole Davis, who reluctantly falls under her spell to save the space program. To add wacky star power, Woody Harrelson was enlisted to play Moe Berkus, the Howard Hunt-like government agent (he recently played Howard Hunt in the series White House Plumbers) who wants to stage the fake moon landing on the sly and substitute it for a real landing in case the mission goes awry or even if it’s successful.
Sparing no expense, the movie features impressive and expensive special effects … but it’s no Apollo 13. As a commentary on creating fake events, it’s reminiscent of Wag the Dog (Woody Harrelson was in that) but only barely. It’s trying to be a big-budget, romantic comedy period piece, I guess. So why go to this expense to revive an all-but-dead genre?
The supporting cast is big. It includes Ray Romano playing Henry Smalls, a senior NASA controller who is close to Cole, plus cameos from Colin Jost (Scarlett’s husband), and Victor Garber.
Its visual effects staff includes a couple hundred people. The Art Department must have 75 more. They produce an impressive launch but not as good as Ron Howard’s 30 years ago. There was an actual NASA launch during filming of the movie, and NASA allowed the crew to film it with their 4K cameras. In that sense, it is different than Apollo13, which created all of its own effects with no original footage.
Chris Evans was originally cast to play opposite Scarlett (they have done at least a half dozen movies together, mostly comic book movies like Avengers). But he dropped out, and Tatum was hired. This is the third film featuring Johannson and Tatum, but they never appeared on screen together in either Don Jon or Hail, Caesar.
The bottom line is that Fly Me to the Moon is not a very good movie, and it sure doesn’t know what it wants to be. It will underperform at the box office and will move quickly to Apple TV+, I predict. What a waste of a lot of money and a fair amount of acting talent.