Fly Me to the Moon
Director: Greg Berlanti
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson
Genre: Space, sometimes not a frontier
The irony of a romantic comedy not being comic or romantic is when it’s based upon an untrue moment capitalising upon a true event.
In the supposed romantic comedy Fly Me to the Moon, the developing relationship between (not real) marketing maven Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) and (kind of real) Apollo mission launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) was as unfunny as it was uninspiring.
The film was based around the scheduled NASA Apollo moon landing in 1969 and a fake landing it was creating to ensure its reputation stayed strong if the landing failed. Conspiracy theorists claim that’s a thing. When you’re a bit of a scientific nerd like I am, the difficulty in suspending your disbelief of the underlying plotline makes the whole film problematic.
An actual thing though is how good an actress Scarlett Johansson is. This was magnified by the poor and rather emotionless and unconvincing performance of Channing Tatum. Credit also goes to Woody Harrelson who nailed his role as the “government agent” Moe who commissioned the fake landing. Mind you, his rough, rude and funny character is pretty much the same as many of his movie and TV roles, so this film probably wasn’t a great challenge to him.
What all the above boils down to overall is dullness. The unromantic, only occasionally amusing comedy resulted in a lack of interest and me falling asleep towards the end. Apparently, I didn’t miss anything!
Rating: 1 Scarlet
