The Big Picture

Fly Me To The Moon
is a high-concept romantic comedy set in the Cold War era, focusing on the space race and a marketing guru tasked with selling the moon landing.
The film features a charming cast, including Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, and balances predictable rom-com beats with the absurd concept of faking a moon landing.
Despite some minor issues with character development and pacing,
Fly Me To The Moon
is an enjoyable and memorable rom-com with strong writing and performances.

Certain places and times have that special something about them, a romantic je ne sais quoi that’s undefinable and undeniable. The canals of Venice, Italy. The beauty of Kyoto, Japan. The sensory pleasures of Paris, France. Last (but never least), the majestic government bases of Cold War Florida. In all seriousness, it’s not the first place most would think of as a rom-com setting (specifically one centered around an attempt to sell, and then fake, the moon landing). Fly Me To The Moon, the new Greg Berlanti romantic comedy about love in the time of the space race, really shouldn’t work. Surprisingly, like the Apollo 11 rocket whose launch it centers around, it somehow sticks the landing.

The film boasts a rare combination of factors that cohere into one of the most memorable high-concept rom-coms in recent memory. What if the folks from Thank You For Smoking prevented the world of For All Mankind from coming to pass (with echoes of Lubitsch and deep-net conspiracy theories)? The cast is genuinely charming, the dialogue hits, and the narrative itself nicely evolves as it progresses, keeping it from ever feeling stuck. The pivots into new territory at times need more nuance in their development, as do certain character choices. As a whole, however, Fly Me To The Moon escapes the gravitational pull of stale genre tropes and carves itself something new and beautiful among the stars.

Fly Me to the Moon (2024) Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis’s already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up.Release Date July 12, 2024 Writers Keenan Flynn , Rose Gilroy , Bill Kirstein

What Is ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ About?

Fly Me To The Moon takes place in a Cold War America that’s a little gun-shy about the space race following the tragic real-life Apollo 1 fire. This poses a problem for the United States government, which is locked in competition with the Soviet Union yet needing greater public and congressional support to light a fire under a new rocket. Enter Kelly Jones (a relentlessly charming Scarlett Johansson), a marketing guru brought to the Kennedy Space Center to shine up the space program’s branding while ensuring Apollo 11 makes the United States look good. She butts heads with Apollo 11 project lead Cole Davis (a perfectly serious Channing Tatum), a pilot-turned-NASA-bigwig who puts the mission first and fails to see the value in the government’s marketing concerns.

Potential lovers with secrets are a fairly common rom-com trope, fueling genre classics like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner, its effective remake in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, or Gil Junger’s Shakespeare modernization 10 Things I Hate About You. There’s a bit of that here, but the most important secret here comes straight from Uncle Sam. The project’s secretive handler Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) doesn’t just want Kelly to sell the moon landing, he wants her to insure it by staging a fake moon landing simultaneous to the real one. It’s a fail-safe to keep egg off Uncle Sam’s face, but it’s also an insulting bit of subterfuge behind the backs of NASA’s astronauts and engineers, a surefire way to cause tension between Johansson and Tatum’s mutually crushing coworkers. It’s this charmingly absurd turn of the wheel, borrowing from decades of real-life conspiracy theories, that turns Fly Me To The Moon into something genuinely special.

‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Lands a Novel, Absurd Tale With Charm and Humor to Spare

The first introduction to Scarlet Johansson’s Kelly is electric. She enters across the table from a room full of corporate men, and immediately it’s evident that she’s a mile ahead of them. There’s clear intelligence and charm in her every interaction, alongside layers of mystery that Johansson lands with aplomb. Channing Tatum’s Cole is tortured, serious, and stiff by design, at least until he rises to the occasion against a set of important challenges. Despite having the less flashy protagonist, Tatum has more than enough charisma to make Cole nuanced and engaging throughout. Johansson and Tatum are the heart of the film, and they’re well-supported by the rest of the cast. Woody Harrelson is a mysterious chaos agent as Moe, and Jim Rash is thoroughly hilarious as fake moon landing director Lance Vespertine.

While the relationship elements in Fly Me To The Moon do follow fairly predictable rom-com beats, they’re elevated considerably by the higher-than-usual stakes of their important historical moment set in the heart of the Cold War. Additionally, the absurdist concept alone sets Fly Me To The Moon miles above stereotypical rom-coms. It’s breezy and engaging to watch Kelly humorously push to sell the concept of space to the public against Cole’s serious reservations, but it ratchets up another level entirely when the real Apollo efforts are simultaneously mimicked with Hollywood magic. The back-and-forth between the plotlines is well-balanced and provides ample opportunity for different kinds of conflict and tension. The final act wraps up with further escalation around the fake moon landing, cementing Fly Me To The Moon as one of the highest concept rom-coms in years.

Related The Classic Romantic Comedy That Was Almost a Murder Mystery The iconic rom-com almost took a very bizarre turn.

While the movie’s pacing and various twists are well-developed overall, some individual pivots or moments of tension are resolved too abruptly or easily. Certain character turns emerge too suddenly and need better development. When Kelly starts to have visible doubts about Project Artemis, it’s a pretty sudden about-face for the character up to that point. A couple pivots in Cole’s journey similarly would benefit from more thorough development. The character feels almost universally change-resistant for much of the narrative, but there are a few key moments where he forgives too easily or changes too quickly given what’s come before. Additionally, the evolving narrative leading into the faked moon landing is clever and exciting, but the pivot from the project of selling the moon landing to faking it is so thoroughly universal that it at times seems like a step into an entirely different movie.

All these are minor issues, however, in the context of a film that works quite well thanks to a strong, charismatic cast, solid world-building, and a clever script that’s well-structured and quite funny. Fly Me To The Moon has a bevy of quotable lines, like Anna Garcia’s wonderfully blunt “this is what happens when you work for Richard Nixon” or Lance Vespertine’s exasperated “stop looking at me and be on the moon… stop flirting, and be on the moon.” It may glide too easily along some major plot points, but the rom-com is still a wildly enjoyable ride anchored by spot-on comedy and a cast whose chemistry is out of this world.

Strong Writing and Performances Make ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ Soar
Image via Sony Pictures/Apple Studios

Altogether, Fly Me To The Moon really shouldn’t work as well as it does. Its handling of Cold War state politics runs the risk of having either too little context or being too dry and exposition-laden. Stiff, by-the-books characters like Cole Davies are sometimes a bore to watch in a genre that’s typically breezy. There are ample opportunities for missteps in its dealing with the more absurdist elements as the narrative proceeds. The script as a whole avoids these potential pitfalls well, carried by strong comedic moments, an excellent cast, and the continual charm of a narrative that never falls into a rut thanks to constant evolution. It uses traditional rom-com tropes, but sets them in wildly new contexts that give fresh life to what could be old material.

Fly Me To The Moon is essentially the movie equivalent of an improv troupe’s central “yes, and” commandment. “Yes, we sold the real-life moon landing like it was so many watches” becomes “yes, we built cutting edge rockets to land on the moon AND we also faked it” becomes… no spoilers here, but there’s a final, tense pivot that’s a strong finale. It’s good to see such a well-budgeted and ambitious high-concept romantic comedy. It’s a rom-com that humorously enough exemplifies the adage to shoot for the moon, so that even a miss lands among the stars–it doesn’t quite land every beat to its fullest extent, but perhaps that’s the peril of trying genuinely wild swings. At its core, Fly Me To The Moon is a thoroughly enjoyable, memorably novel rom-com that regularly surprises in a genre that often doesn’t, and we’re all better for it.

REVIEW Fly Me to the Moon (2024) Fly Me To The Moon is an ambitious, charming rom-com with charismatic performances and a funny script, but some important plot and character pivots could have stronger development.ProsGreg Berlanti’s confident direction and Rose Gilroy’s funny, high-concept script deliver a memorable, novel romantic comedy.Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum have full-tilt movie star chemistry and give excellent performances, anchored by a strong supporting cast.Strong worldbuilding situates the audience in the Cold War-set world well without getting bogged down by needless details. ConsCertain important pivots in the story would benefit from honing in their introduction and development.Some relevant character choices aren’t adequately developed and contexualized.

Fly Me To The Moon releases in U.S. theaters on July 12. Click below for showtimes near you.

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