'Fly Me to the Moon' Is Snorrible

I did not particularly like last year’s Anyone But You, a poorly scripted romantic comedy that nevertheless gets by on the charms of its leads, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney. But I loved what it represented: A huge box-office smash for a romantic comedy that essentially elevated Powell and Sydney onto the A-list. It’s been a long time since a romantic comedy earned $200 million at the box office (on a mere $25 million budget) and boosted the careers of its actors.

I’d hoped this would kick off a renaissance of modestly budgeted, theatrical rom-coms. It’s not rocket science: Good chemistry and a solid script, and Bob’s your uncle. As we saw with Anyone But You, even a good script is optional.

I had high hopes that Fly Me to the Moon would keep the ball rolling. Forget wannabe A-listers: This one had the real deal in Channing Tatum (coming off his passably fun action-romance with Sandra Bullock, The Lost City), and Scarlett Johansson, making her rom-com comeback after the genre’s 2010s nosedive. (Remember her in Nanny Diaries with Chris Evans, or that bonkers He’s Just Not That Into You ensemble?)

Sadly, it’s fallen flat, and the $100 million price tag is the first red flag. In 2024, there’s no way a rom-com with that budget is going to make headlines for the right reasons. When a studio — in this case, Apple — throws that kind of cash at a rom-com, it’s setting it up to fail. I’m sure it will do fine on Apple TV+ when it’s released there in a few weeks, but it won’t inspire studios to greenlight more romcoms.

To make matters worse, it’s just not that funny or entertaining. It starts off pleasant enough, but even that wears thin after 90 minutes, leaving you clock-watching for the last 45. You can’t blame Tatum or Johansson — they’ve got chemistry. It’s just that the whole thing feels overproduced and more concerned with everything except the romance.

That might fly if it were a more engaging flick, but Fly Me to the Moon comes from TV producer/director Greg Berlanti, and boy, does it show. The guy behind all those CW superhero shows also directed Katherine Heigl’s achingly bad Life As We Know It, and apparently hasn’t learned much since 2010 except how to burn through cash. You put people as hot as Charming Potato and Lady Mumbles McJost in a movie, you’d hope to see something with more passion. Alas, Fly Me to the Moon is a chaste romance, where even the bickering between the two feels immediately affectionate.

Set in an alternate 1969, the U.S. is neck-and-neck with the Soviets in the space race. One of Nixon’s shady operatives, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), recruits a con-artist-turned-PR-whiz, Kelly Jones (Johansson), to sell the space program to Joe Public and keep the Congressional cash flowing. NASA’s by-the-book launch director, Cole Davis (Tatum), isn’t keen on Jones’s plan to use astronauts to hawk Tang and watches — he’s still haunted by the deaths of Gus Grissom and two other astronauts during an Apollo 1 test.

Predictably, Davis warms up to Jones’s publicity stunts, and their icy relationship thaws into romance. That is, until Berkus decides to use Jones to fake the moon landing, not trusting Davis to get it on film.

This moon landing fakery — which you’d think would be the meat of the movie based on the trailers — only shows up in the last half-hour. By then, I was so ready for the credits to roll that the third act felt like an endless slog, culminating in a farcical finale more suited to one of Berlanti’s CW shows than a $100 million blockbuster.

I think Apple and Berlanti seriously overestimated audience interest in what is essentially a 135-minute equivalent of a Sinatra number. Nobody wants to see Magic Mike and the Black Widow play dress up in ’60s outfits and use the space program to sell Fruit of the Loom underwear. Fly Me to the Moon may find an audience with the same folks who liked Down with Love, but even that movie — a box-office failure itself — was infinitely more entertaining and risque. There, the characters were pushing against the time period; here, they seem confined to it, resigned to the conventions and limitations of a romance from the married couples sleeping in separate twin beds era. I’m sure some will consider it a charming throwback; I thought it was a drag — too much plot and almost no sizzle, a movie doomed to perpetuity on Apple TV+s top movies chart among other insanely expensive disasters like Ghosted and Argyle.