Fly Me to the Moon could probably be funnier, or more romantic, or more visually resonant, but it’s so charming and well acted that we might not notice. Set during the Space Race of the 1960s, at a time when NASA was struggling to hang onto its legitimacy in the wake of major early setbacks, the film also takes its share of liberties with some of the facts. So, not quite a history lesson and not quite a rom-com and certainly not an epic, the movie is a mild but pleasant mishmash of genres held together by the sheer charisma of Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, two actors who seem unexpectedly well suited to each other’s energies.
Johansson plays Kelly Jones, a slick Madison Avenue advertising executive who when we first meet her is pretending to be pregnant while sweet-talking a group of Ford executives into a proposed campaign highlighting newly installed seat belts in their Mustangs. She is so expert at adopting different accents and attitudes, and so willing to make up stories about herself, that we suspect early on that Kelly might not even be her real name. Sure enough, she’s soon approached by Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a shadowy figure from the newly elected Nixon administration, who wants her to go down to Florida and provide a little public-facing pizzazz to the moribund, not-ready-for-prime-time geeks at NASA, who are about to lose their congressional funding.
Kelly doesn’t want to do it, but Moe knows things about her past — initially kept vague t.
