MOONFALL: Positively Lunatic

Director: Roland Emmerich

Writers: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser, Spenser Cohen

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, John Bradley, Charlie Plummer, Wenwen Yu, Michael Peña, Carolina Bartczak, Eme Ikwuakor

Runtime: 130 mins.

2022

I've done the public service of jotting down Actual Quotations from the feature film Moonfall:

"If the moon really is what you think it is, we're gonna need a megastructurist."

"I hope the moon holds together, at least for a little while anyway."

"I got a lot of my own problems down here." "And the moon falling to Earth isn't one of them?!"

"Sonny, the moon is going to help us!"

"We scanned your consciousness. You're part of the moon now."

These are the quotations of a movie besotted with saying the stupidest shit imaginable about the moon. This is also a movie very much in love with Elon Musk, from which I'll invite you to draw your own conclusions.

From the opening sequence that announces its plagiarism from Gravity with a bullhorn, to the ending sequence in which a character placidly takes a phone call mere moments after a world-shattering cataclysm, Moonfall perpetually reaffirms its stance of not including a single brain cell in its runtime. This is no novelty for director Roland Emmerich, whose filmography primarily consists of disaster movies populated by walking cliches.

There's a surprising amount of soft family drama for a movie about the moon falling to Earth, but that doesn't mean any of it is worth a damn. Every human-level scene is a catastrophe of dull blocking and nonexistent urgency. Existential apocalypse can be unfolding before a character's eyes, and their line delivery will not extend past 'ordering a pizza' cadence. Every actor is bored out of their skull except for John Bradley, who easily achieves MVP of the cast by delivering a remarkably humane performance despite being a delivery system for aimless exposition and one-liners like, "We just entered Ludicrous Mode."

And yet... when the movie pulls back from the human scale and focuses on disgorging gargantuan amounts of flashy CGI destruction onto the screen, it kind of rules! There is something refreshing about seeing Emmerich's enthusiasm for ridiculous carnage leech into the visuals. It sparks my eight year old self's fixation on natural disasters (which was fed at the time by Emmerich's own The Day After Tomorrow). The passion with which Emmerich levels a city with a MegaTide is lost in more mundane studio-approved shared-universe products.

Then there's the moon. O, the moon! Moonfall combines a tremendous disrespect for the moon's scientific properties with a tremendous respect for the moon's mythic scope. For a narrative built entirely around scientists, Emmerich has a praiseworthy compulsion to jettison plausibility the moment he conceives of something cool. The sloppy synthesis of these impulses leads to something I never thought I would see:

The moon as a slasher villain.

Characters run, drive, squabble, and fight only to have their drama periodically interrupted by a character yelling some variation of, "Oh no! The moon is coming!" as the predatory globe surges over the horizon, trailing ribbons of atmosphere, the surrounding sky rage red. Horns blare on the soundtrack. Some try to run, some try to hide, but the gravity swoon of a pursuing moon cannot be denied. Once the scene is played out, the moon retreats back over the horizon, sated but readying its appetite for more destruction.

These scenes, unfortunately only a small percentage of the runtime, are pure daft bad movie bliss. It's a shame the glut of the film around them is basically worthless, but the melodrama's blithe monotony really does make the lunar scenes shine.

1 / 5  BLOBS