Truth and Deception in “Fly Me to the Moon” | Review

MOVIE REVIEWS

Fly Me to the Moon (2024)
Directed by Greg Berlanti

Fly Me to the Moon, by Greg Berlanti, ties into NASA’s current space project to return humans to the moon, presenting a comedy that cleverly and wittily addresses conspiracy theories about the supposed fake moon landing of 1969. The film weaves a narrative based on marketing and the increasingly strategic role of images in the modern world.

The Finger and the Moon

Hired to rejuvenate NASA’s public image, marketing prodigy Kelly Jones (Johansson) clashes with launch program director Cole Davis (Tatum), causing chaos in his already challenging job. When the White House deems the mission too critical to fail, Kelly is tasked with staging a fake moon landing as a backup plan. The countdown then truly begins.

In recent years, interest in space travel has been renewed, involving private companies and NASA’s preparations for a new moon landing. Tests have begun, but astronauts won’t set foot on the moon again until 2026, if all goes well, marking 57 years since Armstrong and Aldrin planted the American flag on the lunar surface. Or did they? Fly Me to the Moon, Greg Berlanti’s fourth feature film, is a decent mid-range movie served by a sometimes insightful screenplay. It underscores a simple truth: today, truth is a commodity, constantly contested by fake news. Asserting it, even with documented evidence, is futile. In an era where news is more falsifiable than ever, and critical thinking is often confused with the a priori questioning of any “official truth” or “mainstream narrative,” even science and fact-checkers are seen as pawns of “the powers that be.” From 9/11 to crop circles, from chemtrails to COVID-19, from UFOs to climate change, everything is the opposite of everything. We live in a time of absolute relativization of truth, far removed from Occam’s razor: the simplest and most probable version of facts is rejected in favor of more convoluted and intricate ones, accessible only to the “enlightened” minds, fed by fake news peddlers.

Additionally, the increasing centrality of images in our lives dematerializes reality, especially regarding one of the last century’s great conspiracies—the moon landing: did it really happen, or was it staged, perhaps by Kubrick, as some have long believed? Rather than dismiss this deeply rooted yet paradoxical theory, Fly Me to the Moon ironically leans into a paradoxical, metacinematic plot: the journey happened, but there was also an attempt by a Nixon associate (Nixon still being the quintessential villain in the collective imagination) to broadcast a studio-filmed landing from one of Cape Canaveral’s hangars to control the images for governmental interests. The project, named Artemis (after the Greek moon goddess), aimed to beat the “reds” at all costs, ensuring Americans wouldn’t wake up, as Woody Harrelson’s Moe Berkus slyly puts it, “under a communist moon.” Thus, the obscure director Lance Vespertine (Jim Rash) is hired to film the deception to replace the truth.

Enhancing the film’s appeal to the average viewer is the love story between the two protagonists, convincingly portrayed and well-matched, representing the two poles of attitudes toward truth: Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) defends it uncompromisingly, while Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) finds lying as easy as breathing. Rose Gilroy’s debut screenplay—she’s the daughter of screenwriter Dan Gilroy, who also directed Nightcrawler, and actress Rene Russo—is schematic but not banal, occasionally offering predictable but effective lines in the ongoing play of truth and deceit. For example, when Kelly, after one of Vespertine’s many whims, remarks, “Maybe we should have called Kubrick,” or when she admits that she, despite being adept at slogans, could never have come up with Armstrong’s famous phrase, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Berlanti, who alternates personal films with more “commercial” ones (like the mediocre Life as We Know It), replaced Jason Reitman in the project, initially titled Project Artemis. It’s easy to see why Reitman was chosen, considering his debut film Thank You for Smoking (2005), focused on the advertising world surrounding big tobacco companies. Reitman might have taken a more acidic and biting approach, while Berlanti smooths out the rough edges with a rosy ending. While this worked perfectly in the delightful and intelligent comedy Love, Simon (2019), celebrating gay identity with healthy lightness, here it dissipates many of the film’s sharp insights and reduces Vespertine’s character to a stereotypical gay caricature. Ultimately, the film speaks in a kind, paternalistic tone, absolving everyone and hinting at its propagandistic nature in light of new space ventures, as if directed by the real Kelly Jones, the marketing queen.

Vittorio Renzi

Quinlan, July 13, 2024