Acceptable for a hangover day: Fly Me to the Moon reviewed

Fly Me to the Moon is a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum set during the 1960s space race but, unlike Apollo 11, this isn’t going anywhere we haven’t been before. The extent to which the film does take flight is largely thanks to Johansson’s charisma, even though I couldn’t help shake the feeling they’d fired up a Maserati for a job that basically required a pootle to the shops and back. Tatum, meanwhile, doesn’t have to do much but stand around and look beefy – but he does excel at beefiness. (The shoulders on this fella!)

The film opens in 1969 with Johansson as Kelly Jones, a Madison Avenue marketing genius. Give her something to sell and, whatever it takes, she’ll sell it – i.e., if pretending to be pregnant will help win a pitch, she’ll strap on a fake bump. (I think we are meant to find her immoral, but isn’t this just how all advertising works?) One night, in a Manhattan bar, she’s approached by Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a shady government official who offers her an assignment that she can’t refuse as he has some damning evidence against her. The assignment is to bring the American people around to the Apollo 11 moon-landing project and to schmooze the politicians who hold the purse strings. (The project is already heavily in debt and in danger of being cancelled.)

As Berkus makes clear, this is as much about ideology as scientific achievement. Should the Russians put a man on the moon first, then communism wins. It is, he says, a race ‘for who gets to run things’. She is relocated to Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center where she encounters the launch director, Cole Davis (Tatum), who is 82 per cent shoulders, 18 per cent neck.