Fly Me to the Moon

Grade: C

The moment in Fly Me to the Moon where I slipped out to visit the restroom was right before the launch. I figured I know what happens in that moment. I can miss the rocket taking off. I came back a couple minutes later, and they hadn’t even gotten to 10 in the countdown. That’s the inherent problem with this movie. It’s bloated, stretched out, and might have been more tolerable as a tight hour and 42 minute film, instead of 2 hours and 12 minutes. Maybe not, though. I otherwise found the acting and characters quite surfaced.

Scarlett Johansson stars as a traveling, identity-changing charismatic con artist – “Catch Me if You Can” style. A government figure is on to her, but sees she has talent, so he brings her over to NASA to do marketing. Played by Woody Harrelson, he knows where everyone is at all times, and frequently makes surprise appearances to twirl his fedora and make slimy, conniving, intimidating, threatening speeches. His final moments in his last scene probably had the cast and crew on set laughing, applauding, and going on about how “people are gonna love that exit – it’s gonna kill!” I found it mildly cute.

Channing Tatum is the launch director. He and Johansson have a Meet Cute in a diner, then lo and behold, they end up working together. It’s the Space Race of the 1960s. Apollo 11. Everyone’s desperate to beat the Russians to the moon, including a couple young astronauts named Armstrong and Aldrin. Tatum and Johansson spend most of the film at odds, which of course means they’ll be coupled up by the end. Harrelson’s agent presents the idea of filming a fake moon landing, in case the real one doesn’t work out.

I should start a new tag on this website – one that denotes the instances where I think a certain actor is in the movie, right up until I see it. 7 months ago, I thought Kirsten Dunst had a supporting role in Anyone But You. It turned out to be the great Hadley Robinson. In Fly Me to the Moon, I was looking forward to seeing Stanley Tucci as a temperamental, extremely flamboyant film director brought on to oversee the “backup” moon landing. It’s not him, but rather Jim Rash, from Bros. I was disappointed, but either way, he’s very fun, and the first spark of energy and enjoyment only comes when he first enters to do his business. I wonder if anyone will think the performance is offensive, but it worked for me.

It feels a bit late to start a new act with just half an hour to go, but the sequence in the last 30 minutes was my favorite. It’s all about the launch, and fooling Harrelson into thinking the fake broadcast is what’s going out on the air. Even they have trouble telling them apart, when looking at it on side-by-side screens. An obvious thing happens to differentiate them, and it’s an entertaining payoff to a setup that lasted the whole movie. Otherwise, I wasn’t on board with Fly Me to the Moon. It’s overlong, and the filmmakers seem unsure of which plot to focus on. I didn’t really care about any of them. I mentioned Catch Me if You Can. How cool would it be to have Johansson star in a gender-bended “Catch Me” remake?

Grade: C