“Fly Me to the Moon” tries to be a lot of things at once, but it fails to work as any of them on the whole. While it busily swings back and forth between comedy and drama as intended, both of its comedy and drama do not work enough due to a number of glaring weak aspects here and there, and the result is an incoherent hodgepodge which does not leave much impression on the whole.

The fictional story of the movie is set in US during the 1960s, and its comic part mainly revolves around Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), a young and confident female advertising executive who can be quite sneaky and deceptive for her business goals. The opening scene shows her skillfully persuading several male executives to make a deal with her, and you may be a bit amused by how wily she can be for getting her job done.

Anyway, not long after this successful job of hers, Jones is approached by a shady government agent named Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), who offers her what may be the biggest job in her rising professional career. While they are in the middle of the Apollo Program, the folks in NASA really need to improve their public image for getting more fund for beating the competing space program of the Soviet Union, and that certainly requires Jones’ particular set of skills. Mainly because the offer turns out to be something she cannot possibly refuse due a little personal reason, Jones agrees to work for NASA, and she soon goes to the NASA headquarters in Florida along with her female assistant.

Of course, things do not look that promising from the beginning, and the public opinion on NASA keeps going down as the American society is riddled with many other social/political issues such as the Vietnam War, but Jones is not daunted by that at all. She soon does a pretty good job of improving the public image of NASA much more than before, and that makes the public more interested and enthusiastic about NASA and its ongoing space program.

However, one particular person in NASA is not so pleased with what Kelly is doing, and that person in question is Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the launch director at the Kennedy Space Center of NASA. He and many other technicians under his supervision have been really trying their best for the success of the Apollo 11, and he certainly does not want to get their process interrupted by Kelly’s relentless PR stuffs including the blatant commercials associated with those three astronauts of Apollo 11.

Naturally, Jones and Davis clash a lot with each other right from when their first day in NASA, but, what do you know, they also find themselves attracted to each other as they constantly push and pull each other during next several months. As coming to recognize that they are in the same team after all, they come to open themselves a bit more to each other, and some possibility of romance is accordingly suggested to us.

However, the movie sadly lacks any kind of chemistry between its two lead performers. While he can be effectively serious or funny as shown from “Foxcatcher” (2014) or “The Lost City” (2022), Channing Tatum somehow looks merely stiff and bland here, and he also fails to generate some gravitas in case of his character’s personal story involved with that infamous accident during the early years of the Apollo Program. In case of Scarlett Johansson, who incidentally also participated in the production of the movie, she surely has more stuffs to handle for her more colorful performance, but her good efforts are frequently dulled by Tatum’s rather blunt counteracting, and the possible romance between their characters becomes less believable as a result.

Meanwhile, the screenplay by Rose Gilroy, which is developed from the story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, gets more distracted as clumsily changing its direction during its last act, where Berkus makes Jones make the fake video clip of the Moon Landing just in case. There is some suspense as Jones and Davis try to stop this fake video clip getting broadcast all over the world instead of the real one, but everything in this part is so predictable to the core that you will not be so surprised to see how a certain black cat comes to function as something equivalent to Chekhov’s gun.

Besides Johansson and Tatum, the rest of the main cast members do as much as required by their respective roles, though they are mostly under-utilized to our disappointment. While Woody Harrelson provides some comic relief as expected, Ray Romano looks fairly serious as Davis’ close colleague, and Jim Rash has the most fun in the film as a neurotic gay filmmaker hired to shoot that fake video clip of the Moon Landing.

In conclusion, “Fly Me to the Moon”, directed by Greg Berlanti, is dissatisfying as failing to develop enough any of its comic potential, and your mind will probably keep going back to a number of much better films associated with NASA. While “The Right Stuff” (1983) and “Apollo 13” (1995) surely come first, “Hidden Figures” (2016) and “First Man” (2018) are also both compelling and entertaining in each own way, and I must tell you that all of these films are sometimes actually more humorous than whatever I saw from “Fly Me to the Moon”. Believe me, you will have a more productive time with any of these films, and you may thank me for that.