Fly Me To The Moon

Fly Me To The Moon is a film about the space race, or at least it uses that point in history as a backdrop. An all star cast including Woody Harrelson, Scarlet Johansson and Channing Tatum carry the story of the first moonwalk. Channing Tatum is really known for goofy roles. He has great comedic timing but he really hasn’t been awesome at roles that require anything more from him. That said, seeing him in Deadpool and Wolverine as Gambit really changed my viewpoint on him as an actor. So I can’t wait to see what he does with this movie.

Scarlet Johansson plays an incredible advertising executive. She is brought in to fix NASA’s public relations problem. She gets to bring her very funny and outspoken assistant.

The visuals are immediately recognizable. This movie is meant to be taking place in the 60s and it is very immersive. It very much looks like the decade that it should look like.

This NASA field manager and the PR lady meet at a diner and here the rom com ensues. At first the genre feels like historical fiction but the moment these two characters meet it feels like a romantic comedy. Rom Com is the genre it is categorized as, which automatically kills any chances of awards no matter how good it is because we stopped awarding romantic movies a couple decades ago now.

So every rom com needs tension and a source of conflict, the conflict between our field manager and our publicist is that she is doing her job. That’s really it. The NASA science guys refused to do interviews so she hired actors to play them. Channing Tatum in a romantic lead makes a lot of sense to me, he’s done it a few times before, I was hoping for something that would challenge him a little more but that’s okay.

I love that she is the one pursuing him. He seems mildly annoyed with her while she is promoting Apollo 11 and the astronauts themselves but they are clearly attracted to each other. I don’t know if it's just the amount of times I’ve seen each of them on my screen or just how many younger roles Channing Tatum has played but it feels like he and Scarlett Johannson have a huge age gap. When in reality they only have a 4 year age gap and he’s older than she is…that doesn’t feel real.

For a romantic comedy the film does not spend that much time actually on the relationship, we spend a lot more time on the historical fiction aspects of the film. There is nothing wrong with balancing the narrative with the setting, but when you let it overwhelm the story then you lose the purpose of the genre you are claiming. The story should fall apart without the romantic storyline if it is truly to be a romantic comedy. I would argue that this film is more historical fiction and those just tend to have romantic plotlines in them.

It's a cute movie, it has some good writing between the two main characters. I don’t think that Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson really had all that much chemistry together. You can’t just put two attractive people on a film set together and expect chemistry to happen. There have been quite a few more rom coms produced in the last few years and some of them follow classic structures and are very good, unfortunately this is not one of them. At least not as a romantic comedy. As historical fiction it is very entertaining. Total I give it a 7/10, nothing bad but nothing extraordinary either.