Why ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Fails So Hard
Some movies don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish. Fly Me to the Moon has a wacky comedy premise that should have made for a fun trip to the theater. However, nothing achieves liftoff except for one of the performances. Sadly, a decent premise is ruined by a completely awful approach to the story.
‘Fly Me to the Moon’ fails as a comedy
One can imagine how Fly Me to the Moon was pitched. Someone told an executive that they were going to make a comedy centering around the conspiracy theory that the moon landing was staged. The executive was hoping for something hilarious. Instead, the script felt like a rejected Julia Roberts rom-com. If the executive had any taste, that would have been the end of that.
Fly Me to the Moon is the fictional story of an advertising expert (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is hired to make NASA look cool. She responds the only way she knows how: by using their image to sell products. If an astronaut-themed advertisement for underwear is your idea of humor, this is the flick for you.
‘Fly Me to the Moon’ should have been tasteless
Halfway through the story, she’s asked to film a fake moon landing because NASA is worried that they can’t film the real deal. She gets a second-rate director to do it for her. He’s the rival of Stanley Kubrick, the visionary who wingnuts will tell you filmed the moon landing on a soundstage. A reference like that tells me that the folks behind Fly Me to the Moon know something about films, but little about filmmaking.
The material here begs to be made into a cartoonish farce that rivals Airplane! and The Naked Gun. Meanwhile, Fly Me to the Moon is merely cute. It wants to be charming, retro, and tasteful, much like the Frank Sinatra song that lent the movie its title. Really, the film should have been as odd and tasteless as Sinatra’s forgotten cover of “Old MacDonald,” which reimagines the “chick” from the original song from a bird into a sexy babe having a hot night on the town.
The themes of the movie are botched
Trying to be trendy and retro, Fly Me to the Moon also touches on misinformation and why it’s bad. I won’t spoil anything, but there are elementary school children who could see the ending of this picture coming from a mile away. But predictability isn’t the real problem here.
The jokes don’t land, even though Johansson does her best to infuse them with some warmth. Furthermore, the whole film starts to feel hypocritical after a certain point. Fly Me to the Moon is about the immorality of misinformation, but it goes out of its way to create a plausible enough but false narrative of the Apollo 11 mission. What are the filmmakers trying to do here?
Perhaps someone who understood irony a bit would have been able to create a film that threaded this line between truth and falsehood. However, this film is just conventional fluff. Maybe this movie will work for a couple that loves both conspiracy theories and Old Hollywood romance. In that case, you should just stick with any Marilyn Monroe movie.
