Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in Fly Me to the Moon.Dan McFadden/Sony Pictures
- Fly Me to the Moon
- Directed by Greg Berlanti
- Written by Rose Gilroy
- Starring Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum and Woody Harrelson
- Classification PG; 132 minutes
- Opens in theatres July 12
Houston doesn’t have a problem so much as it does an embarrassing failure to launch with Fly Me to the Moon, a new space-race romcom that is one small misstep for audiences, one giant leap backward for the summer movie season. And if you think that line is hackneyed, wait until you get a load of this film, which is so drained of colour, chemistry and comedy that it feels like a cruel gravitational gag. Don’t for a second think that movies can lift you off the ground, at least not when they’re this leaden.
Opening with history-for-dummies narration by Woody Harrelson playing a Richard Nixon fixer – a character whose voice-over reeks of last-minute editing panic, given that the device never returns – director Greg Berlanti’s film stumbles into a number of different genres, unsure what kind of audience it wants to engage.
At one point, Rose Gilroy’s script is a wannabe-zippy opposites-attract offering, pairing slick Manhattan marketing hotshot Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) against straitlaced NASA hotshot Cole Davis (Channing Tatum). She’s been ordered by Harrelson’s White House adviser to clean up NASA’s image to a wary public in the wake of the Apollo 1 disaster. He’s just trying to get his men to the moon to prove that the United States can pull off the impossible. Sparks fly, or they would if Johansson or Tatum played remotely interesting characters, or were able to generate the tiniest bit of electricity. At various points, you’ll want to throw a tub of astronaut ice cream at the pair – anything to wake them up.
In the absence of such fourth-wall-breaking stunts, the film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions, from a conspiratorial spoof about faking the lunar landing to a tense drama about the high stakes of the mission, as if Damien Chazelle’s First Man was algorithmically smooshed together with Matt Johnson’s Operation Avalanche, only not nearly as fun as that sounds. Only with the arrival of Jim Rash, playing this film’s answer to Stanley Kubrick, does the movie deliver any desperately needed laughs. Rash might be responsible for the film’s sole emotional underpinnings, too. There is more poignancy in his character’s bid to be taken seriously as an artist than there is in any of the interactions between Kelly and Cole.
Just as worrisome: For a movie about selling the whiz-bang-pow excitement of the space race, there is a distressing lack of visual panache. Berlanti, who has developed a wildly successful career running a mini-television empire that includes Arrow and Riverdale, has limited himself here with a visual palette that can only be described as NASA-sanctioned grey. The television veteran also seems uneasy with feature-film pacing, stretching his story to an interminable 132 minutes – just nine minutes shorter than Chazelle’s epic and eight shorter than Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Houston, you have the night off.