Fly Me to the Moon is two hours and 10 minutes long. Does it need to be this long? No.
In fact, I would go as far as to say it would be a better movie with half an hour of the fat trimmed.
Considering we live in an age of crumbling attention spans where short YouTube clips have been replaced by even shorter TikTok snippets, surely no one is asking for a two-and-a-half-hour rom-com? Well, the makers of Fly Me to the Moon beg to differ.
Starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum as enemies-turned-lovers, Fly Me to the Moon wants to be more than just a feel-good rom-com.
It decides to merge ‘confident, funny girl meets nerdy, shy boy’ with… the Space Race.
As the Apollo 11 rocket launches towards the moon, Tatum’s Cole Davis, who is leading the mission from Earth, spends as much time astronaut-ing as he does whimsically staring at Johansson’s Kelly Jones.
A lot of effort goes into replicating the mood of the late 1960s – they’ve even gone so far as to drink from Styrofoam cups.
Johansson and Tatum look the part, but something is off. It clicked halfway through the film and once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop.
Tatum is in a constant battle with his forehead which so desperately wants to express emotion, but he’s botoxed all that away.
Despite this, Tatum is good. He’s very non-threatening for someone who’s 6’1” and built like a gladiator.
Johansson, who simultaneously serves as a producer on the film, also gives a strong performance.
She’s a marketing whiz that gets recruited by Woody Harrelson’s Moe, who works for President Richard Nixon, to up NASA’s public profile.
The matter of misogyny in corporate America is conveniently dealt with in the film’s opening scene with Johansson's Kelly very much the vehicle to convey this.
It plays like something the film knew it had to acknowledge and was eager to get out of the way so Kelly could set about her mission of selling just about anything with a tenuous link to space, from OMEGA watches to toilet paper.
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Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson attend the premiere of Fly Me to the Moon
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Kelly’s approach to selling NASA is a grotesque love letter to capitalism – in her eyes, the Vietnam War is little more than NASA’s airtime competition.
Critics are calling this tone-deaf, and it is. But is it not also realistic that most people choose to largely ignore the ills that occur outside of their little bubble? Is Kelly not just human?
Her character doesn’t owe critics political correctness.
Once one accepts this, Fly Me to the Moon becomes a rather brave movie that doesn’t shy away from the conspiracies around the moon landing and – unlike most comedies – is actually quite funny at points.
