There are films that are based around true stories that are so far fetched and removed from the original notion that it makes me truly laugh and selfishly and wrongly I will hold this against films I don’t like and forgive it with films I do like. Fly Me to the Moon has simultaneously one of the more basic and one of the more outlandish premises I’ve watched in a while, pairing standard tropes with high concept factors and fashioning the whole thing as a true story, without any winking at all really to the think that it is beyond fabricated. But the final screenplay that we get from Rose Gilroy from a credited story by Keenan Flynn and Bill Kirstein is then presented at points with beyond absolute seriousness. Greg Berlanti directs the whole thing in fact with a real touch for the drama of the characters beyond the glitzy veneer of the period set rom-com. It does feel clunky overall, but to be frank one can’t help but be taken in by the sheer well crafted joy of the thing.

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Fly Me to the Moon straddles so many genres that one can feel their head begin to spin, does it even pull all of the genre attempts off? No it does not. But what Berlanti and Gilroy’s film does have is a sheer sense of joy about it, and dare I say biting intelligence. Now this intelligence is thwarted repeatedly by a bizarre shifting of tones that plagues the film from the off and never really lets up, but then the charm of the actors and their performances, the intrigue of the overall setting and plainly the fun and entertainment of the set-up alone lends to make Moon a very enjoyable film that worked a lot more for me than it didn’t. Berlanti and Gilroy both make steps in their directing and their writing respectively to rise above the tropes and trappings of what could be seen as typical nostalgia bait, now of course it can never rise above the incessant need for constant hit pop songs on the soundtrack – but I did happen to watch this film in a rather ungrumpy state and so every one of them never struck me as clawing, as sometimes these overflowing soundtracks often can. The core of the film however is with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum who manage to again through sheer charisma, chemistry and indeed entertainment make one begin to forget the bizarre clutches this story sometimes thrust us into. Johansson is the flashier part and rises to it certainly, with Tatum playing more so in his severe serious man type than his more humorous of turns. Much of the humour of the film is instead left to Jim Rash as a very enjoyable and difficult to work with director brought in for the more high concept aspect of the film. Woody Harrelson too joins the club as both a jovial member of the cast, whilst also bringing the tension to the feature. Both Rash and Harrelson deliver in spades and are a prime example of why Fly Me to the Moon is a film that rather unfairly I will categorise as ‘far better than perhaps it has any right to be’.

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The most ideal 7/10 one can imagine. Brimming with charm and entertainment, if reductive and cliché ridden and bolstered by a screenplay that is a lot weirder and insulting to real life than it first seems. The worst possible double bill one can imagine to the 10/10 masterpiece that is First Man that on the other hand I couldn’t recommend more. Tatum and Johanson on screen and Gilroy and Berlanti off screen genuinely make what could have been a sub par film with a great premise into something highly enjoyable, if not masterful. Is it far too long? Most certainly. Will I ever watch it again? Most likely not. Could I recommend it to most everybody, yes I certainly could and would and will – and in a balanced film-going diet, one needs all types of cinema.

P.S. Was my inflated opinion of this film largely inflated by how miserable I was during and immediately after my screening of Kinds of Kindness, to such an extent that I considered just going home. Possibly, very possibly. Will it be heavily crowd-pleasing for how crazy a film it actually is when it break it down, I hope so. I very much hope so.

-        Thomas Carruthers