The brightest stars in director Greg Berlanti’s nimble romantic comedy based around the 1969 moon landing are not the luminous balls of flaming gas that burn fiercely in the night-time sky and twinkle around Earth’s only natural satellite.
The honour is reserved, instead, for the celestial pairing of Hollywood hotties Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in this playful romp about the filming of a fake Moon landing. They create their own fireworks with a delightfully old-fashioned and chaste courtship reminiscent of duelling sexes in screwball comedies from the 1930s and 1940s.
Heartfelt and witty repartee in Rose Gilroy’s script is the rocket fuel and the two leads ignite when they verbally spar as a publicity shy NASA launch director and flashy New York marketing executive, punctuating playful gibes with longing glances. Buttons remain tightly fastened – Tatum is snug in a vest and sweater for most of the picture – and Berlanti makes us wait well into the second hour before lips touch.
Documented history is rolled in glitter and sent into crowd-pleasing orbit with a colourful supporting cast to safely land the one-liners.
Woody Harrelson and Jim Rash are the big bangs. The former clearly relishes his role as a CIA agent unconcerned with social niceties, while the latter is a hoot as a self-absorbed film director with an ego bigger than his resume who is secretly hired to shoot “an alternate version of the moon landing” with actors on a sound stage in case the camera on Apollo 11 fails to transmit.
Fly Me To The Moon doesn’t take one giant leap for romcomkind but does achieve that winning combination of charm, humour and heartfelt emotion.
Screenwriter Gilroy has a blast melding fact and frothy fiction. “It’s called selling. We’re not lying to the customer, we’re changing the way they think,” asserts Johansson’s silver-tongued saleswoman. Perhaps I’m just another sucker but I’m sold.
