” Fly Me to the Moon ” is better than it looks. This is not a slam against the marketing campaign for the space race rom-com about a straight-laced NASA man and the Madison Avenue marketing savant brought in to sell the mission to the moon. It’s more about the state of theatrical moviegoing.
A film like this, with legitimate movie stars in Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, a slick, glossy look, an original concept, and a sparkling title, is not a commonly occurring phenomenon at the local cineplex. We’ve been conditioned to see something like this and assume one of two things: It’s the product of a high-spending streamer, or it’s fake, like one of those movies-within-a-movie that’s mostly there for laughs but also at least somewhat plausible. Both assumptions are on point, but the former is essentially true: This is an Apple production that like “Napoleon” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” is going to theaters first, on Friday, through a traditional studio (Sony’s Columbia Pictures).
It’s not just a gesture to theaters either — it’s streaming date has yet to even be announced. The director is television veteran Greg Berlanti, whose films include “Love, Simon” and “Life as We Know It.” Here he seems to have taken a stylistic and tonal page from Peyton Reed’s “Down with Love,” that 1960s via 2003 Rock Hudson/Doris Day pastiche starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.
The script, by Rose Gilroy and story, by Bill Kirstein and .