If the Moon Landing Were a Romantic Comedy

Near the end of The Truman Show, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) flees his home in the middle of the night. He’s come to believe that his surroundings are fake, that the people around him are actors, and that everything he does is being broadcast as “authentic” entertainment to an audience. He’s right, of course: Watching over him is the godlike Christof (Ed Harris), the program’s mastermind. “Cue the sun,” orders Christof. And out comes the “sun,” bathing the massive soundstage in artificial light.

In the new film Fly Me to the Moon, the sun also rises on cue over a soundstage built to delude viewers. The movie follows a secret government mission to fake the moon landing and, like The Truman Show, explores the power of televised images while hitting theaters at a pivotal moment in human technological progress. But if the 1998 film was a prescient tragedy scrutinizing the rise of reality TV and social media, Fly Me to the Moon turns our brewing anxiety around fake videos and AI-driven content into, of all things, a breezy screwball romance. The film doesn’t offer much wisdom about how we should deal with our growing unreality, but it is a charming diversion. In a way, its very shallowness is the point: Sometimes, the film posits, what we want to see matters more than what we actually do.

At least, that’s what Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), a chipper marketing maven hired to turn NASA’s public image around, believes when she first arrives in Florida. Striding around Cape Canaveral, she immediately catches the attention of—and then clashes with—Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the buttoned-up, tightly wound launch director of the Apollo 11 mission. She’s all spunk; he’s all nerves. She’s convinced that the project could be just the thing Americans need to keep their minds off the Vietnam War. He thinks his work should remain behind closed doors. Before long, she’s turned the campus into a set, using ethically questionable methods. The astronauts leave their posts to pose for photo shoots. Actors are hired to play gawky scientists during interviews. And the president’s shadowy lackey, Moe (Woody Harrelson, having a blast), lets Kelly place a camera on board the shuttle. Fly Me to the Moon casts the space race as nothing more than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for America—one that would succeed if only the two absurdly good-looking people at the story’s center got along.

The film’s loose interpretation of historical events treads perilously close to disrespect at times, if not plain foolishness. (The Apollo 1 fire is revisited repeatedly as part of Cole’s backstory, turning tragedy into a fictional factoid.) But Fly Me to the Moon is fueled by a retro, eager sincerity, along with a winning comic turn from Johansson, whose cheery line readings come with a dash of self-doubt, grounding the story in Kelly’s growing concern over whether she should be so brazenly manipulating the public. Everything in the movie comes off as a little too Hollywood-perfect, whether it’s Johansson’s wigs or Tatum’s “smartphone face” or the brisk banter between the two. Yet this veneer feels intentional, deployed to underline the film’s interest in how easily a polished presentation can woo audiences into believing what they’re seeing. The jokes, too, are inoffensively fun without being overly silly: Kelly demonstrates a knack for over-the-top accent work; Johansson’s husband, Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost, pops up as a daffy politician; and punch lines about the director Stanley Kubrick, believed by real-life conspiracy theorists to have faked the moon-landing footage, abound.

Fly Me to the Moon’s own director, Greg Berlanti, meanwhile, is familiar with the appeal of a colorful pastiche; he’s the uber-producer behind the CW’s run of DC Comics shows, as well as Riverdale. Here, he nods to space-race films such as The Right Stuff and zippy satires such as Wag the Dog, filling the movie with nostalgic images and familiar tropes: There’s the slow-motion astronaut walk, plentiful shots of characters gazing at starry skies, and a mercurial Hollywood director played by Jim Rash whose sole purpose is barking outrageous demands.

Though the film drags in the final act, the tone is so lighthearted, the characters so earnest, and the chemistry between Johansson and Tatum so cute that it’s easy to get swept up in its fiction. Some doctoring of images and videos begins to feel purely like a good contingency plan. Never mind that NASA is dealing with budget cuts these days; that Boeing, a company heavily featured in the film, is no longer a sterling example of American ingenuity; or that our world has become a relentless camera-ridden panopticon. The comedian and writer Nathan Fielder’s recent output might be better suited to offer mankind giant leaps in its understanding of reality, the way The Truman Show once did. Fly Me to the Moon, for better or worse, is content to remain a small, satisfying step.