Fly Me to the Moon review: Scarlett Johansson’s Nasa romcom is odd, conspiratorial nonsense

Fly Me to the Moon pushes romcom relatability to its very limits, with a premise that boils down to: “babe, would you be mad if I faked the moon landing?” As a quasi-historical take on America’s space race, it draws from the conspiracy theory that Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin never made it to the moon, a brand of delusion I’d worried was so time-old that it had finally gone out of style. Well, Hollywood has brought it back, just in time for its fans to enjoy the film while wearing one of those $100 tin foil hats rapper MIA now sells.

And, while Rose Gilroy’s script does offer its own, less inflammatory take, there’s no actual disclaimer here and no rebuttal to its narrator’s claims that this is “the real story (mostly)”. Fly Me to the Moon is nonsense, and not the fun kind of nonsense that The Martian’s Ridley Scott might cook up. Instead it takes a smash-and-grab approach to history that ruins what should have been a relatively straightforward job.

It’s meant to revive the pop-Sixties aesthetics of classic Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicles (most famously, 1959’s Pillow Talk and 1961’s Lover Come Back). That would explain why Scarlett Johansson is here, with her old Marilyn Monroe bob and she’s-a-hell-of-a-dame speech pattern. She plays Kelly Jones, the (fictional) ad exec hired to muster support for Nasa’s Apollo 11 mission, destined to put man on the moon before the Soviets.

Greg Berlanti, who directed 2018’s sweet gay romcom Love, Simon, is behind the camera. And Channing Tatum has stepped in as the male lead, the (also fictional) launch director Cole Davis. He’s all muscles, crew cut hair, and puppy dog earnestness. Cole is committed to the mission and honest to a fault. Kelly is a born schemer ready to Don Draper her way to success, with an arsenal of fake accents and a willingness to stage and broadcast a fake moon landing.

It’s classic enemies-to-lovers: he hates how all the toothpaste ads and astronaut photoshoots have cheapened his work, while she thinks lying is as natural a human instinct as love. Johansson and Tatum have decent, if not electric, chemistry. And while the sets and costumes seem plausible, Berlanti makes no real effort to evoke the era or its cinema beyond a split screen or two (there’s certainly none of the playful quality of Peyton Reed’s underrated Down with Love from 2003, with Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger).

The biggest problem, though, is the odd way Fly Me to the Moon insists on making a statement, and getting teary-eyed, over its own fake history. We’re left with a series of violent tonal switches. In one scene, Colt’s cutely chasing a cat through a car park. The next he’s reckoning with his (I must stress, fictional) responsibility for the disaster of Apollo 1, a real-life failed mission to the moon that killed its three crew members. Berlanti makes sure his audience is reminded exactly how those men died – horrifically – as the camera pans in on their command module as it’s engulfed in flames.

Meanwhile, Kelly steals all her best ideas from the horrors of Vietnam (including broadcasting the moon landing live), while berating her younger assistant (Anna Garcia) for not wanting to work for Richard Nixon or the company that produces napalm. A brassy character slowly transforms into a morally problematic one. And Kelly and Cole, in that light, become somewhat harder to root for. Unless, I guess, government cover-ups were a key part of your own romantic history.

Dir: Greg Berlanti. Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Nick Dillenburg, Anna Garcia, Jim Rash, Ray Romano, Woody Harrelson. 12A, 132 mins.

‘Fly Me to the Moon’ is in cinemas from 12 July