Photo © Sony Pictures
Channing Tatum in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’
Channing Tatum in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’
In 1961, John F. Kennedy pledged that Americans would land on the Moon by decade’s end. It was a promise his successors kept, though it wasn’t always clear that the goal would be met. The Soviets had an early lead over the U.S. in the space race, and problems dogged America’s Apollo program.
With Fly Me to the Moon, director Greg Berlanti (“Dawson’s Creek) takes a light-hearted look behind the scenes at Cape Kennedy. It stars Scarlett Johansson as Kelly Jones, a fictional Madison Avenue marketing wiz (“Mad Women”?) who takes charge of the operation—not the engineering of the Saturn 5 rocket, or astronaut training, but the PR. According to Fly Me to the Moon, Apollo 11 was sorely in need of a branding facelift if it ever hoped to reach the lunar surface. But first Kelly must overcome the objections of NASA’s no-nonsense launch director, Cole Davis (Channing Tatum).
Rose Gilroy’s screenplay has several clever twists. Woody Harrelson plays a covert Nixon operative whose dirty tricks (did he also mastermind Watergate?) get Kelly fired from her pricy Manhattan job. Suddenly unemployed, she agrees to become NASA’s public relations director. Boldly stepping where no woman had gone before, she finds NASA’s science-tech nerds absolutely hopeless and replaces them with actors in TV interviews. As she goes about the business of making engineering sexy, Johansson gives a fast-talking Rosalind Russell performance fit for a screwball comedy. She works her Roledex, calling in favors from networks and glossy magazines. Much to Cole’s horror, she lands product sponsorship from Omega watches and Fruit of the Loom (boxer shorts in space?). And she promises to make the Apollo astronauts— Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins—as big as the Beatles.
Tatum plays Cole like a befuddled John Wayne, a laconic Alpha male uncomfortable in the company of women and unused to heeding their direction. His relations with Kelly come down to attraction-repulsion, combustible rocket fuel for a romantic comedy.
Fly Me to the Moon contains nuggets of historical truth as it plays out against the backdrop of televised coverage of the Vietnam War. Some Congressmen fretted over the expense of sending men to the Moon and many Americans wondered whether the money should be spent here on Earth. None of that mattered on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong ventured from the lunar lander, live on television. The world was spellbound.
