I struggle with my personal outrage when thinking about Fly Me to the Moon. I’ve got it enough under control that it only effects my final rating by just a little bit. There’s enough actually wrong with this flick to dislike it on its merits.

The film tells the story of build-up, launch, and landing of Apollo 11 on the moon. It takes the unique approach of telling the story through the eyes of a marketing team brought on to sell the moon landing to the public. Which includes a fake moon landing backup plan.

When I first heard about this, I thought it was irresponsible to make a frothy romcom with a fake moon landing at its core. There are enough bullshit moon landing deniers (and flat earthers) that even promoting the idea as comedy is the wrong move. And, after seeing the film and its pounds of horseshit, I stand by my annoyance.

I don’t want to oversell the fake moon landing part since it only wanders into the movie at the half-way mark. Before that, the first act of the film had me on its side. Light and silly with a poppy attitude about selling product that borders on cynical without being cynical due to its light touch.

Unfortunately, around the middle of the film, I found its zippy energy flagging and I began to lose interest. It stops feeling energetic and begins to slog. Two hours is a big ask for the frothy tone and barely-there romcom plot between Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum.

Scarlet does her level best but Tatum’s decision to play a wooden plank left me cold. God bless the lunkhead, but I don’t buy him as a NASA launch administrator. I credit him for trying to break out of his himbo mold, but he was incapable of doing so. And the romance angle between them makes me doubt the flick is even a romcom.

But now we get to the hundreds of pounds of horseshit. The fake moon landing angle pissed me off. Not just because it’s irresponsible, but because the film reaches a natural crescendo with the launch… and the flick keeps going with its unlikely subplot. The “NASA faked the moon landing” conspiracy theory is based on NOT GOING TO THE MOON but the film shows them landing on the moon. And yet the plot twists itself into knots by insisting on a live fake landing mixed with the real audio from the moon. Why was this still going on, mixing in a daft NASA heist while a historic moments was happening?

And what’s worse, the film claims it’s a true story – getting away with a “mostly” to cover up its horseshit. On the plus side, it delivers a pretty solid launch and moon landing that shows the filmmakers true goals with the film. It’s just they wanted to have their moon landing cake and eat its goofy conspiracy plot too.

Grrr. Argh. I know I’m making hay out of something most people won’t care about. Again, I struggle with more personal biases here so if you made it this far, I apologize for jumping up and down about it. But happily so much else didn’t work for me that I can safely give it a lower rating regardless of my righteous indignation.

Score: 69