You have to invent a conspiracy to make the Moon landing a farce

If ever there were an event about which Americans can be justifiably, sincerely, and perpetually proud, it was surely the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. You remember: Neil Armstrong, Tranquility Base, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” — the whole bit.

Yet, in a sign of the perversity of our times, a new movie seeks to diminish, distort, and, finally, demean this monument to American resourcefulness, guts, and engineering know-how. Fly Me to the Moon, playing in theaters now, advances a completely made-up account of the moon landing in the guise of a peppy romantic comedy: The movie tells us that public excitement for lunar exploration was negligible, that mysterious figures from the Nixon administration contrived to create a “fake” moon landing in case some catastrophe prevented the real one, and that a girlboss saved the day. 

Of course, none of this is true. And the movie, a rough approximation of the 1960s-era Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies, never pretends that it is. Even so, the fact that the moon landing, of all things, is fodder for such a cheap, cynical fictitious treatment is a sorrowful sign of the times. Is nothing sacred? 

Before it descends into “alternate history” territory, Fly Me to the Moon begins rather promisingly: Scarlett Johansson stars as Kelly Jones, a bright, bubbly New York ad agency mover and shaker whose success at her trade is a reminder that, once upon a time, working women made tactful use of their femininity, not just their feminism: In a nicely done little scene, Kelly, outfitted with a pillow to appear pregnant, is seen expertly sweet-talking Mustang executives into agreeing to her ad campaign highlighting the automotive maker’s seat belts — women, she tells them, will adore their husbands for being so safety conscious.

Yet trouble is brewing a world away in sunny Florida, which, in director Greg Berlanti’s vision, is not a bastion of freedom but a cauldron of space-age ineptitude and apathy. We are told that NASA has reached a low ebb. The space agency’s budget has been hacked away at. And the failures of other missions, including the deadly launchpad fire on Apollo 1, loom over the pending Apollo 11 mission. Among the few NASA officials holding it together is launch director Cole Davis, who, as played by Channing Tatum, has something of the manly professionalism of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. So far, so good.

Enter Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a vaguely CIA/FBI/White House Plumbers-type figure who corrals Kelly into signing up with NASA as a kind of all-around marketing fixer. Her mission is to gin up public excitement for Apollo 11, but even in these appealing early scenes, there are warning signs on the horizon of the movie’s actual agenda: For example, Kelly’s assistant Ruby (Anna Garcia) is loudly anti-Nixon and ardently anti-Vietnam War in a way that does not seem entirely believable for a Madison Avenue worker bee in the late 1960s; political stridency was not yet the coin of the realm — at least outside of Berkeley, California.

Even so, Johansson is agreeably take-charge when she descends on Cape Canaveral: One of the better scenes features Kelly gaining access to a restricted area simply by snatching a tour guide’s badge and marching through the door. The gung-ho Johansson, sporting a fashionable bob and a wardrobe consisting of capri pants and pencil skirts, bounces nicely off of the strong, stoic Tatum, and the two are teased as a potential couple early and often. Berlanti has a sure eye for period detail, and the diners, cars, clothes, media, and technology of the era all look authentic. As a facsimile of a Rock and Doris comedy, Fly Me to the Moon is at least as good as Peyton Reed’s Down with Love, an apparently long-forgotten charmer from 2003 with Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger. 

The picture of competency, Kelly succeeds in packaging sponsorships between NASA and the brands of the age, like Tang and Fruit of the Loom. Here, the movie could have settled into a perfectly bewitching conventional romantic comedy: Will Kelly and Cole find romance on Earth while Neil Armstrong walks on the moon? 

Sadly, the screenplay by Rose Gilroy, from a story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, has more profound things on its mind: questions of fakeness and authenticity and the great American art of the swindle. 

Like a bad penny, Moe turns up with another proposal for Kelly: In case a disaster derails the real moon landing, could she round up a cast and crew to film a fake moon landing that could be broadcast in its stead? Jim Rash stars as Lance Vespertine, the flamboyantly exacting commercial director tapped to play auteur on this secret production. “Kelly, these aren’t real actors,” Lance says upon surveying the federal agents who will “play” the astronauts on the fake moon set that has been constructed in Florida. Later, he complains the moon dust-sprinkled soundstage resembles nothing more than a dirty beach, and at one point, he asks where his trailer is. 

This is all amusing in an American Hustle or Argo sort of way until it sinks in that the filmmakers are tinkering with actual history in order to make this speculative confection. What, exactly, is the point of saying that fake moon landing footage was filmed? That the federal government will go to any lengths to perpetuate a fraud on the American public? That’s fair enough, but in the case of the moon landing, they didn’t. It does not prove that Nixon administration-adjacent officials were evil when a movie accuses them of doing evil things they never did. 

The film is equally slippery in its presentation of Kelly: The filmmakers wish to view her as both complicit in a fraud when she agrees to whip up the fake moon landing and heroic when she fesses up and teams up with Cole against Moe.

Maybe I am taking all of this too seriously. Fly Me to the Moon is charming enough for most of its length: The movie recreates its world skillfully, and Johansson and Tatum make for a nice pair. Harrelson is agreeably rascally, and Ray Romano, as a NASA colleague of Cole, has acquired some weary gravitas in his late middle age. Yet, in appropriating a great achievement for a would-be expose of American fakery, the movie is more depressing than funny. 

Forty-one years ago, Philip Kaufman’s great adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff presented an ambitious, audacious vision of the intrepidness of America’s test pilots and astronauts. The movie had a healthy perspective on the triumphs and failures of the space age; it humanized these men, but it certainly never tried to diminish what they had achieved. Fly Me to the Moon offers not the right stuff but the fake stuff. And who, really, wants to see that? 

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.