Fly Me to the Moon

A marketing guru (Scarlett Johansson) from New York is brought into NASA to help improve their image and get enough funding to pay for the Apollo 11 moon mission. Along the way she buddies up to the launch director (Channing Tatum) and starts to make his life a little more difficult.

A classic rom-com formula, but set to the backdrop of the 1960s space race? The premise sounds a bit stretched and sure enough it’s pretty weird in practice too. The mission to the moon gets in the way of any real chance at romance or even comedy, and so when their relationship gets crowbarred into the story it feels like the two of them need to get the fuck out of NASA and get a room.

Tatum and Johansson do strike up a spark on screen though, and they work with what they’ve been given perhaps better than most would have. There’s not much leeway for real sexual tension (verboten these days in rom-coms?), but wit and romance are very much there. This is also one of those movies where everyone looks amazing, in that way that only glossy breezy Hollywood comedies manage to pull off.

I’m not going to run to watch Fly Me to the Moon again but it’s a mostly charming throwback to when ludicrous stories were OK as long as everyone is funny enough and charming enough.