Is it too early to call 2024 the year of the rom-com comeback? Movies like “Anyone But You” (which, to be fair, is from 2023), “The Fall Guy,” “The Idea of You,” and others all helped pave the runway, but “Fly Me to the Moon” just might have used this as a launching pad to reach even greater heights. After an opening credits sequence (which in and of itself has become a lost art lately) sets the stage for the space race that would dominate the majority of the 1950s and 1960s, we meet Channing Tatum’s NASA director Cole Davis at an early, character-defining moment: While testing for the upcoming Apollo launch, an unexpected leak of an odorless, colorless, and highly flammable gas sends technicians scurrying for cover. Everyone except Cole, that is, who improvises an outdated method of finding the faulty piece of equipment so the crew can get back to work … until a much larger fireball proves there is such a thing as being too married to one’s work. Luckily, fate has precisely the wrong person in mind to balance out our doggedly intrepid, rigid, and awfully buttoned-down wannabe astronaut.
Holding up the other half of this rom-com with deceptive ease is Scarlett Johansson as Kelly Jones, an unmistakably Don Draper-like advertising guru/con-woman with a checkered past of her own and an established history of resorting to underhanded means in order to successfully sell her marks on a pitch. While Cole’s simple, honest worldview can be clearly read from miles away — from orbit, even — Kelly is his exact opposite. Ruthless, clever, and intuitive to a fault, her introductory scene similarly establishes everything we need to know about this wildcard. After an early scheme goes awry, she finds herself recruited by Woody Harrelson’s shady government official Moe Berkus to help an underfunded and understaffed NASA “sell the moon” to an increasingly disinterested public and penny-pinching political benefactors alike. Her inevitable meet cute with Cole is the first of many swoon-worthy moments of sparks flying (in every sense of the phrase), artfully setting the tone for a shared arc that tempers its predictability with a sizzling chemistry between both stars.
That said, “Fly Me to the Moon” can’t quite sustain a seamless transition between the historical drama unfolding as its backdrop and the love story at its heart — one that’s complicated when business mixes with pleasure. As they find themselves at odds over how best to keep NASA’s Apollo program running and relevant, the straight-laced, no-nonsense Cole bristles against Kelly’s shameless (but effective) strategy of ad campaigns, photoshoots, and Tang tie-ins. In an ironic twist, it takes a full hour for this marketing-conscious movie to actually get to its big marketing hook: Kelly’s secret (and largely fictional) mission to fake the Moon landing, Kubrick-style, as a backup plan. From there, this middle act can’t fully mine this backstabbing betrayal for all the drama it’s worth, instead coasting on its many other pleasures.
