Moonfall
Batshit insane, this two-bit disaster movie is slapped together so haphazardly as to not only be boring, seizure-inducing and garish, but indeed an insult to cinema-going audiences worldwide.
Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) are astronauts in space, when a mysterious force destroys the satellite they are working on, kills one of their crew, and leaves them stranded without power. Even worse; when they manage a miraculous landing, no one believes Brian regarding what he saw, and he is kicked out of NASA. We then cut forward by 10 years, and a mysterious force has knocked the moon from its orbit. Now, the moon is circling closer and closer to Earth, with less than 3 weeks until the entire planet is destroyed. Fowler, now leading NASA in this crisis, recruits the despotic Harper and crackpot scientist who thinks he knows what is up with the moon, KC Houseman (John Bradley) to man one last do or die mission to stop whatever is causing this crisis, and fix the moon’s orbit - all from inside the moon itself.
Directed by Roland Emmerich, MOONFALL looks like it could have been a lot of fun if it nailed the tone. It needed fun, zingy one-liners, and an uber-light story that didn’t get bogged down in a whole bunch of world building, characters, and exposition dumps. Alas, how wrong it turned out.
Let’s start with the story. It is absolute insanity, truly terrible content from the deepest conspiracy theory depths that is buried in endless discussions on why this couldn’t possibly be the case, leaving us with 90% of the runtime spent hinting at something cool, but showing us dead boring seen-before set pieces. It is also absolutely jam packed with characters we are meant to care about. There’s our central trio, but then also their spouses, their ex-spouses, their mother’s in retirement homes, their exchange students, their children, and toss in a couple of random NASA characters. It is way too much. The film jumps from character to character, and has us absolutely despising every second we spend away from the main trio. Donald Sutherland is in this film, and is given literally one scene, maybe 6 lines of dialogue, in a wheelchair before he blows his brains out off-screen and is never seen from again. It is a baffling omelette of minisodic stories that all don’t matter one bit.
Couple that with the logic of the piece, which never fails to out-stupid itself moment to moment. There’s a 5general feeling with disaster, world-ending movies that the rules of physics should be suspended, and we are all OK with that. But MOONFALL throws your tolerance back in your face, shotguns a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and screams ‘FUCK YOU’ before it tries to outdo anything you should reasonably be OK with as a viewer. Whether it’s the ridiculous pull-of-gravity moments towards the end of the film, the spaceship launching effectively underwater, or the giant ship slamming ineffectually into a hotel our heroes are staying in, it is all exhaustingly unbearable.
Performance wise, there’s little on display here to write home about. Sure, Berry is good, and Wilson plays his role particularly early on with a roguish charm that once again makes you question why we don’t see him in more leading roles, but they are hamstrung by the basest, most crude dialogue work this side of Cosmic Sin. Honestly, this movie would have been better as a silent film. That’s not to even start on John Bradley’s faintly neurotic turn, which is cringeworthy in the extreme.
Visually, there’s lots of explosions, but outside of the spaceship launch and a couple of landscapes with the moon super close to the Earth, it’s generally a bust. Early CGI work of a massive tidal wave rolling in looks comically bad, like it’s been rendered on your mother’s rose gold MacBook Air, and later scenes on Earth are so frequently cut, and so blurry, that you really can’t get a grip on anything that’s happening. When we cut to the moon sequences, that is even more disappointing, as we’re presented with bland, Netflix-level CGI work that makes us long for the terrible looking effects back in the Earth scenes; at least they had some ambition.
In the end, there’s a lot to be said for a trashy action movie, and particularly a disaster or end-of-the-world movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is a lot of fun that just washes over you. Hell, I don’t think you’ll find a greater disaster movie apologist than right here. But this was unwatchable garbage. The sort of film that makes you mad because you contemplate what other movies could have been made instead. The sort of movie that makes you lament what could have been done with the premise by someone who actually cared. This is a sin, a crime against humanity, and a strong argument for the reintroduction of the guillotine. It’s a movie that makes you angry, a movie that frustrates and baffles you, and a movie that will make you (more than once) consider leaving the cinema early.
