At first glance the poster to this movie seems kind of irritating. Another woman cheerleading her man to the stars, as explicitly lambasted by Manhola Dargis, but much of this movie is really about the way in which Scarlett Johansson’s Kelly character has an eye for detail and a touch for Madmening Richard Nixon’s bloated NASA program back into the hearts of the American people. The movie is billed as a romcom with historical roots in the space race and a kind of nutty side plot about the “Artemis” contingency to fake the moon landing should plans run awry. The Artemis plan doesn’t make a lot of sense for a number of reasons. And I’m going to spin out into spoilers for a moment here. The plan originally seems like it’s to broadcast the visual from a set, which, for some reason, has to be at Kennedy Space Center in uncomfortably close proximity to the actual preparations for the moon launch, while syncing everything to the audio from the mission, but it seems like that would only be possible if the mission succeeds, so some questions there. Then, there’s this secondary plan that becomes the primary plan where they’re just going to air the set live and match it to the audio? But, again, why match it to audio if you expect the whole thing to not be reliable enough to film? Seems needlessly coordinated with your director and actors and rife with the possibility for failure (ahah!). And then we’re kind of left with the actual final act where (spoiler), there’s this ambiguous moment in time when we’re not sure which feed we’re looking at because the real thing is so unbelievable and the set looks so good, until events transpire that verify one story over the other (which is actually kind of cool if not super convoluted).
Scarlett’s Kelly is so good at her job that her selling of the moon mission virtually wraps up in the first thirty minutes of the film and then we’re dragged through kind of a long, schmaltzy mission montage where everyone’s getting serious about the dangers of space travel and the relationship between Kelly and the flight director heats up, until they go on their first date, which she uses to spring a new idea on him, filming the whole mission for live coverage, leading to him kind of blowing up on her, which leads her to go behind his back, which further leads him to blow up on her, which constitutes one too many harsh words from either party in a romcom for it to credibly continue. A lot of the romance is built on this fantasy of the incredibly hot Kelly character pining endlessly after the tortured, idealistic flight director despite all of his abusive and demeaning behavior, the thrill of the chase and the fact that her self-esteem is preternaturally low because of a Deep Dark Secret that’s not actually that damning on her part, which means that she can aspire to date this dude but she doesn’t actually feel like she deserves him, you know? So she’s willing to do anything and endure every character flaw to prove herself worthy. Meanwhile, Channing Tatum’s Cole Davis has some insecurities of his own since his sloppy handling of the Apollo 1 mission led to the deaths of three astronauts and he’s never forgiven himself for it. Also, he has an arrhythmia, so even though he’s the “best pilot who never got to go to space” he never gets to go to space. Tragic, right? Constantly brooding, frustrated, with better speeches throughout the movie than the scripted actors playing him on television, Cole is absolutely charming from start to finish. His broom test at the beginning is such a subtle and perfect illustration of his ingenuity and bravery, it almost wins you over to thinking that NASA isn’t a piece of racist bullshit that should’ve been defunded and redistributed to pay for meals for black kids so that more of them could become math majors so that they could do all the hard calculations that enabled those white boys to make it to the moon without any of the credit. But again, there’s a whole different movie about that to make you feel better about all the good things white people at NASA did to help black women go to the bathroom.
And for all the file footage of the NASA launches and the spoken word and big band songs featured in the soundtrack, it’s kind of perplexing to me that at no point did anyone even allude to Whitey on the Moon, which seems like the only appropriate thing to play, but maybe it’s too much of a crib from Lovecraft Country at this point.
A film that asks “Will they make it or take it?” about the moon landing nearly seventy years after the events transpired is kind of asking the wrong questions, if you ask me personally, but the fact that it’s more a romcom that’s coincidentally set at NASA in the late summer of 1969 kind of makes it work? I wish there had been less space stuff? Because space movies are now what vampire movies were twenty years ago, and the fact that Scarlett Johansson has had to shift her romcom plots from the likes of Don Jon in 2013 just ten years ago to whatever this movie is really makes me feel quite old.
No Babadooks on this one, but big shout out to Channing Tatum’s summer so far.
