THE RIGHT STUFF meets MAD MEN in director Greg Berlanti’s (LOVE, SIMON) space race romcom. But even with two highly photogenic leads, FLY ME TO THE MOON still fails to ignite.

It’s 1968 and the United States is in a race against time to fulfill the late President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. But both the people’s and the politicians’ appetites for throwing more money at NASA has faded as the country is embroiled in an unpopular war against the Communists in Vietnam and the tragic failure of the Apollo 1 mission a few years earlier continues to weigh heavily in everyone’s minds. That’s where Madison Avenue advertising executive Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson, BLACK WIDOW) comes in. She gets tapped by shady government operative Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS) to fix NASA’s public image and stage a “backup” fake moon landing much to the chagrin of Apollo 11 flight director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum, THE LOST CITY). While Kelly is not one to back down from a seemingly impossible challenge, neither is Cole.

Call me crazy but romcoms are supposed to have two things: romance and comedy. Okay, three things: Some sexual tension. Unfortunately, FLY ME TO THE MOON has none of these. The film isn’t a complete drag though. The big problem is that there’s too much story. Writer Rose Gilroy didn’t need to have two conflict scenarios — the PR campaign AND the fake moon landing. One would have been enough. She also didn’t need to give us Kelly’s backstory. And she also didn’t need to include news footage of the Vietnam War because that’s just a mood killer. Because of all this excess, very little of the film is spent developing Kelly and Cole’s relationship, much less putting it on the requisite emotional roller coaster that it needed to be on to make this romcom work. At no time in the story is Kelly frustrated by Cole or angry with him. Similarly, when Cole shows some frustration and anger with Kelly’s methods, it doesn’t carry over to his feelings towards her. He still respects her throughout. How 2024 of him.

On the plus side, the costumes are fabulous and if the stores would start selling Cole’s short-sleeved mock turtlenecks in mustard yellow, sky blue and olive green, I’d buy them. Unfortunately, that and Kelly’s impeccably tailored pencil dresses and high heels aren’t enough to get this story off the ground.

FLY ME TO THE MOON opened yesterday (July 11th) in Hong Kong and today around the world. It’s not horrible but with a better story, it could have been a lot of fun.

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