Roland Emmerich destroys the world again with "Moonfall", but this time his heart is not in it. Rarely has he come across a conspiracy theory he didn't like, the nihilistic German filmmaker has become the "master of disaster" with movies like "Independence Day" and his own global warming epic, "The Day After Tomorrow". But while his movie "2012" in particular was overwhelming in its passion for turning mass death into a thrilling roller coaster ride with two kids in the backseat, here's "Moonfall," proving that a boring apocalypse movie is worse. that one obsessed with how we are all doomed.
“Moonfall” depicts the horror that would unfold if the moon were to fall out of its orbit and collide with the earth. Before that big bump, Earth's gravity would be progressively out of whack, while the moon would throw up debris as it gets closer. For good measure, Emmerich throws a "Transformers"-esque lead into the wild science as to why this might be happening, but that too comes with smooth imagination and execution. Make no mistake, this movie is worth more as a comparison to Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," about a massive planet crashing into Earth, than it is as a piece of decent entertainment.
Director: Scott Mann
Writers: Jonathan Frank, Scott Mann
Stars: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
The US military decides that the moon, well, they have to bomb it. But there's something else to the moon, something inside of it, and ultimately it's up to three smart people to stop the moon from destroying the earth, including disgraced astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), a plucky director of the NASA and Brian's fellow astronaut. his partner Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry) and a conspiracy theorist named KC (John Bradley) who long thought the moon was a megastructure. KC finds out about this change of course and leaks it to the media, with NASA equating that there are only about three weeks left. They take off in a shuttle with no crew on the ground, and it doesn't feel as triumphant as the movie that tries to minimize the number of actors.
Our three heroes have their personal connections that create dull drama on the ground: There's Brian and his troubled son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) and his ex-wife and his two daughters; Jocinda and her son and her ex-husband and the foreign exchange student she makes take care of her son (Kelly Yu); KC and his mother and his cat, Fuzz Aldrin (in striking close-up).
Co-written with Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, "Moonfall" is a long, ponderous locomotive of one cliché attached to another, making time tick by slowly even though there's a lot of juggling of these different one-dimensional relationships. Human stories are gratuitous in themselves rather than involving us, so telegraphed in the drama of their characters. This is how a stepfather and a distraught son meet again in the middle of the film: "I don't hate you." "You know what? I'll take it."
"Moonfall" suffers from other, more self-consciously cut corners, suggesting a budget that could only include so much destruction (his previous film, "Midway," was more successful with seemingly less phoniness with similar constructions). It's so obvious that the Colorado version of the film is a soundstage with a small snowy road for numerous shots; you can see how tight the actors are, and specifically hear the contempt in Charlie Plummer's line reading. Working with smaller assets than its previous blockbusters, "Moonfall" constantly seems limited by its unsubtle reliance on green screens and the immense work of its visual effects teams. Emmerich's blockbuster vision has come full circle: he could have inspired countless direct-to-video disaster movies with titles like "2012: Doomsday," but now he's made a movie that's visually junky and uninspired to be more.
A transparent and self-fun filmmaker, Emmerich's sense of humanity can be found in who gives the forceful performances and who doesn't. In this case, it's just KC who gets the exclamation points, to yell about how the moon is a megastructure, and finally to her astonishment by proving him right. (For a movie that arrives in the era of Elon Musk and Space X flights, KC goes so far as to say "I love Elon.") But everyone else deals with periods when their experience is an exclamation point: never You've heard someone downplay "Oh shit, the moon is rising" until you've seen "Moonfall." It used to be weird how much Emmerich's nihilism wanted to show destruction, now it's bored of humanity. Even trustworthy forces like Wilson and Berry can't sell how little drama the story has.
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