Fly Me to the Moon Crashes Back Down to Earth

What a weird movie.

Fly Me to the Moon, marketed as a bright, luxe, starry romantic comedy set during the United States vs. Russia space race and the Apollo 11 launch of 1969, is tottering at the box-office and getting very mixed reviews full of speculation about why it doesn’t work. But the film is so odd in its clash of genre formulae, and so essentially conservative in its outlook while featuring a bizarre use of some of the grimmer historical elements of ’69, it becomes a fascinating snapshot of our own wacko ideological moment in time.

This $100 million would-be rom-com stars Scarlett Johansson as top advertising rep Kelly Jones, who dazzles stolidly chauvinistic male clients with her curvaceous beauty and era-appropriate perkiness while going sharklike after success by any means necessary. She’s approached by an equally sharklike government op in the newly elected Nixon administration named Moe Burkus (Woody Harrelson), who coerces her into taking on the peculiar job of “selling” NASA and the Apollo 11 mission to a public disillusioned by failed moon launches and a Congress that’s about to pull NASA’s funding.

It seems that Moe Burkus (not his real name) knows that Kelly Jones (not her real name) is a former con artist desperate to keep her shady past a secret now that she’s found a career in advertising, a legal way to pull the kind of lying scams she was taught at her mother’s knee. The long con that Burkus wants Jones to run is secretly producing a film of a faked moon landing, which is supposedly going to be televised only in the event that the Apollo 11 mission fails.

But the money’s good, and the blackmail is effective, so Kelly takes the job. We can’t help but like Kelly — the inherent lovability of the screwball-comedy heroine is a long-standing cinematic tradition. There’s a lot of that genre in this film’s whole setup, if you think of such masters as Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Preston…