Moonfall
“There’s a bad moon on the rise…”
Cast of Characters:
Jocinda “Jo” Fowler – Halle Berry
Brian Harper – Patrick Wilson
K. C. Houseman – John Bradley
Tom Lopez – Michael Pena
Sonny Harper – Charlie Plummer
Michelle – Kelly Yu
Brenda Lopez – Carolina Bartczak
Holdenfield – Donald Sutherland
Director – Roland Emmerich
Writer – Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser & Spencer Cohen
Producer – Harald Kloser & Roland Emmerich
Distributor – Lionsgate
Rated PG-13 for violence, disaster action, strong language, and some drug use.
The Rundown: In 2011, while working on a satellite repair mission in space, astronauts Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) are attacked by a mysterious swarm that derails the mission. Unable to explain exactly what happened without getting handed a straightjacket and a bottle of Clozapine, Brian is given the boot by NASA.
Fret not, though, Brian, ’cause it’s about to get so much worse for your planet that NASA will have no choice but to take you back.
And worse it does get ten years later when conspiracy theorist K. C. Houseman (John Bradley) discovers that the moon has been knocked off its orbit and is hurtling on a collision course straight-on, smack dab bulls-eye for planet Earth.
Well… looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
Man, Brian, sucks you’re all about to die, but at least you can now die comfortably knowing you were right.
But wait! Hope springs eternal when Jo reunites with Brian for a world-saving mission to – uh – put the moon back? Bringing K. C. and his tinfoil hat along for the ride, they venture out into space to confront this mysterious force and prevent Earth from facing total annihilation.
And with about three weeks to get it all done, so no rush or anything.
Pre-Release Buzz: When it comes to disaster-themed popcorn entertainment of the past 25-30 years, no one has done it better, and in some cases worse, than German filmmaker Roland Emmerich. At his best, we get the alien invasion, disaster-porn fueled Independence Day. At his worst, we get White House Down, a film so atrocious it made the similarly-plotted, mediocre Olympus Has Fallen look like Die Hard. Good or bad, one thing remains constant throughout it all: Roland Emmerich absolutely loves kicking the shit out of planet Earth.
While the first 10-15 years of Emmerich’s career have been filled with fun, escapist entertainment, something happened to him somewhere after The Day After Tomorrow. His films started to suck, and I mean suck badly. Be it 10,000 BC, 2012, White House Down, or Independence Day: Resurgence, Emmerich’s movies quickly morphed into cinematic trash more disastrous than the cataclysmic disasters taking place inside the film.
And then came Midway in 2019, which I wasn’t expecting to like; in fact, hearing news of Emmerich doing a WWII-based film made me instantly flash back to disaster porn auteur Michael Bay’s horrific Pearl Harbor (though, in fairness to Emmerich, he did do a good job with Mel Gibson’s Revolutionary War-based The Patriot). Much to my surprise, though, I found myself enjoying Midway. Sure, it certainly wasn’t Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk, but it had fine performances and delivered more of that trademark Emmerich spectacle that made his best films so enjoyable.
That, and when you’ve set the bar so low for yourself, it really doesn’t take much effort to surpass it.
So, now, Emmerich is back at it again with Moonfall, which is about – well, the moon falling… I guess. Is Emmerich able to crank out another hit like he’s done in the past, or was Midway just a quick rebound before falling back down to the bottom?
The Good: Game of Thrones’s John Bradley seems to be the only one among the cast that gets the type of film Moonfall should be. Channeling both a more stable (i.e, sober) version of Russell Casse from Independence Day and 2012’s conspiracy nut Charlie Frost (one of the very few good things from that turd), Bradley embraces the concept’s ridiculous nature without falling over into irritable territory, and it’s shame that his fellow cast members and even the film itself failed to receive the memo to follow suit. Of course, what you’re hoping to get from this movie will determine whether you find him appropriately amusing or absolutely annoying.
The Bad: So Moonfall is definitely a Roland Emmerich film for better or worse… and mostly for worse. This is a film that somehow manages to be the most juvenile of the new releases to open this week, which says everything you need to know about it when the other film is Johnny Knoxville and his pals punching each other in the dick for 90-minutes.
Admittedly, Moonfall does have a kernel of intrigue within its nutty premise, one that dates well over a centuary ago with H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. One wonders what an ambitious director like Christopher Nolan could bring to this film. Who knows what we could’ve gotten instead? As fun as Emmerich’s films can be when he’s at his best, he is not of Nolan’s caliber, and delivers a snoozer of a film that inexplicably does too much yet also too little with its promising premise. This wants to be both dumb, escapist disaster porn and lofty, existential, high-concept sci-fi, but winds up being too dumb to achieve the latter and not dumb enough to achieve the former.
The main problem with this film is the one problem that plagues most of Emmerich’s worst efforts and that’s his seeming disfatisfaction in sticking with the story’s central conflict. 2012 faced this same issue. It’s not enough for Emmerich to have a film based upon the Mayan’s prediction of a worlwide apocalypse finally coming true. It also needs a divorce couple bickering with each other throughout the ongoing doom and destruction to really beef up the tension. We come upon this issue once again here. The entire damn moon falling straight down onto Earth isn’t enough of a thrilling conflict for Moonfall. What it also needs is not just one divorce couple bickering, but TWO divorce couples bickering.
You know – ’cause you gotta up the ante from before.
In better hands, maybe all the personal family drama connected to our three main space heroes could work (in K.C.’s case, his drama centers around his dementia-stricken mother). However, Emmerich and co-writers Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen show no interest in diving deep into the heart of those matters and instead offer poorly broadstroked mini-conflicts that serve no purpose other than dragging the film’s pacing and taking away time that could be devoted to better developing the main conflict. Moon colliding with the Earth? Engaging theories behind it all? No, we need more. We also need Patrick Wilson’s son, played by Charlie Plummer, not-so subtly treating his mom’s new husband like a tool-bag, all while fending off a few survivalist goons bent on stealing his family’s life-saving supplies. At minimum, it’s an egregrious waste of Michael Pena’s talent, who’s stuck with next to nothing to do as the aforementioned new husband of Brian’s ex who acts like a dick to Brian before very conveniently turning into the family’s hero at the snap of a finger (no joke, Oscar-winner Tom McCarthy played the exact same character in 2012).
But wait! There’s even more. If all that jumbled-up character mess isn’t enough to frustrate you, then wait until you get a load of all the exposition that’s thrown at you here. That’s pretty much what Moonfall is from beginning to end – non-stop exposition, with a few detours along the way to listen to a couple families argue. First, it’s exposition about the moon’s orbit, then Donald Sutherland pops up for literally just a minute to explain what really went down during the Apollo 11 mission, then we get even more exposition about the Megastructure conspiracy theories before all the exposition dumping really kicks us in the ass during the big explanation of the moon’s true source of its power.
Makes sense, right?
For a film that’s just explanation after explanation after explanation after explanation, it’s mind-boggling how the more it explains the more confouding and confusing it gets, so much so I swear that has got to be the reason Patrick Wilson blacks out during one particularly heavy-laden exposition dump toward the third-act. Don’t get me wrong. I love intricate, complex and thematically-driven sci-fi. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind are two of my favorite films of all-time. We’ve also gotten recent great examples such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, just to name a few. However, I don’t expect either intricate, complex or thematically-driven from the man behind Independence Day and 1998’s Godzilla, and that’s also fine. Independence Day is great, B-movie disaster entertainment, and I’m one of the few that defends Emmerich’s Godzilla reboot. Those films, though, knew what they were, didn’t attempt to bite off more than they could, and ultimately worked within their simple yet fun parameters.
Either aim to be smart and ambitious, or be the kind of film that wants me to believe without question that a space shuttle that’s been out of commission for a decade can just be started up like it’s a car. You can’t be both.
The Ugly: What’s most disappointing is that even the big, disaster money shots wind up being a total letdown. This is a particularly shocking flaw given that those big, effects-driven spectacle shots are comfortably in Emmerich’s wheelhouse, so that’s the one area you at least expect his films to excel in. At best, it’s a mixed bag, ’cause once in a blue moon (pardon the pun) you do get a solitary shot that looks impressive, such as one moment where the moon is slowly rising over a mountain peak while it slowly draws in closer to the Earth’s atmosphere. Most of the CGI, though, is so terrible you’re left wondering what Emmerich did with most of the film’s reported $140 million budget. Between the amateurish level of texture and detail provided to some of the disaster effects and the all-too obvious use of green screen, just inserting shots of Emmerich’s storyboard drawings for the disaster set pieces would’ve appeared far more realistic.
As for Moonfall’s two leading stars, at least Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson showed up and got paid. Of course, just showing up is about all I can say regarding any effort they seem to give, as the two sleepwalk their way through the film’s arduous 130-minute runtime. Berry’s an Oscar-winning actress and Wilson’s an underrated actor who’s done fine work in Little Children, Young Adult, Bone Tomahawk, the Conjuring franchise and Midway. That said, you wouldn’t guess that about them here, and watching them tap out immediately after the opening credits is the most depressing sight you’ll see in a movie about a falling astronomical body that’s about to kill everyone on Earth.
I will credit Berry for this – it’s a true testament to her talent that she’s able to clap back at her NASA boss with a hokey line like “I work for the American PEOPLE!!” without showing the slightest break in character.
That’s gotta be take 500 shown in the film. There’s no way in hell she uttered that line in one-take without cracking up in hysterical laughter.
Consensus: Moonfall may have an interesting premise at its core, but it’s wasted on a painfully moronic film that can’t decide whether it wants to be ambitious, high-concept sci-fi or effects driven disaster spectacle, and ultimately fails terribly at both.
Silver Screen Fanatic’s Verdict: I give Moonfall a D- (½★).
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