The most annoying thing about Roland Emmerich’sMoonfallis the way that it constantly swings from the fun kind of dumb and the frustrating kind of dumb. Make no mistake, it’s as dumb as its title would lead one to believe for every minute of its interminable runtime, but it somehow manages the worst sin a movie like this can commit: being boring.
Regardless of name recognition, everyoneknows a Roland Emmerich movie or two. He’s the name that comes to mind when it comes to dumb but fun disaster movies since the nineties. At his best, he crafts empty spectacle worthy of sped-up YouTube compilations set to bad rock music. At his worst, he throws together conspiracy-laden drivel that he seems to think is genius.Moonfallis admirable in the sense that it packs in tons of both.
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There are a lot of thingsMoonfallseems like. AnIndependence Daysequel that was scrapped after the second movie crashed and burned, or a fake movie thatcharacters on a teen sitcomare excited to see. The obvious end result of someone half-explaining the concept of the Roche Limit to Roland Emmerich. Above all else, the film is an open admission that if the man behindThe Day After Tomorrowever had an ounce of restraint, it has now left him behind.Moonfallcontains every bad impulse its writer/director is known for in spades, with very little of the enjoyable chaos that once made his films tolerable to some. However, it does have a lot of pretty colorsand decent sound design, so it will probably make its money back.
For the uninitiated, the plot ofMoonfallis deceptively simple. The moon’s orbit has begun to shift from its eternal path and scientists swiftly realize that its new direction could spell disaster for the Earth. Of course, the man to discover the problemis a conspiracy theorist, so Emmerich can continue his unbroken streak of painting people with conspiratorial ideas as crazy while insisting they have all the answers. To stop the crisis, a disgraced former astronaut with a personal connection to the problem must reconnect with his former partner, now the acting head of NASA. Together, the duo and the aforementioned conspiracy genius must mount a rapid mission to the moon to save the world. Meanwhile, both astronauts' families struggle to survive what’s left of society as natural disasters and bizarre cosmic occurrences rip the world apart. It’s two races against time as the astronauts uncover the truth and the people on Earth fight just to reach safety.
The cast is a mixed bag, butConjuringfranchise star Patrick WilsonandX-Menfranchise mainstay Halle Berry perform well enough in the lead roles. Of course, it’s hard to tell when they have to shout over half their lines. John Bradley, best known for portraying Samwell inGame of Thrones, is entertaining as a dedicated conspiracy theorist and ecstatic fanboy. Both stars come complete with an ex-spouse and estranged children, most of whom don’t get enough screen time to do anything but scream and run away. Everyone who isn’t among the three leads or somehow related to them is either a one-off joke, a nameless criminal or immediately forgotten.
Moonfallis 130 minutes long, two hours and ten minutes, and it warrants justover half of that runtime. Sometimes a long movie has trouble deciding where the cuts should fall, but this one should have been fairly obvious. It spends a ton of its runtime hinting at the mystery behind why the moon is falling, but once it gets where it’s going, the pace grinds to a halt. Subtlety is not an option here, Emmerich needs to sit the audience down and explain every detail of the world-building that went into this movie about the moon crashing into the Earth. Often repeating details multiple times to ensure the audience gets it. Gone are the days ofIndependence Day’sunexplained alien invasion, or even2012’s elegant one-sentence explanation. This insistence on constantly telling the audience what’s going on, even as it plays out on-screen in nightmarishly expensive CGI, is what keepsMoonfallout of the halls of dumb-fun disaster movies.
Most of the problems withMoonfallwere obvious as soonas the first trailer dropped, but everything would have been forgiven if it had just delivered the primal fun it promised. It can’t even do that right. Sure, stuff blows up, the moon careens towards Earth like a live-actionMajora’s Mask, floods and earthquakes batter the cities, there’s fun stuff on display here. It even plays with some science-tinged concepts like gravity waves to spectacular effect. But every time it gets going, and some majestic display of chaos finally fills the screen, it has to slam on the brakes to explain itself or tell another god-awful joke.
Moonfallcontains a fun disaster movie within its bloat, but its obsession with burying the audience in pseudoscience and pointless dialogue keeps it surprisingly dull. Wait for its best scenes to pop up online because the full feature is an expensive disappointment.
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Moonfall
In Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler is convinced she has the key to saving us all - but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper and conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman believe her. So these unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to discover that our Moon is not what we think it is.
