Moonfall
“Moonfall” marries the most beautiful and stunning images Roland Emmerich has ever put onscreen with the stupidest screenplay he’s ever put to paper. That contradiction is either going to work for you, or it won’t. Even as I start writing this review, I’m not entirely sure whether I can overlook the latter for the former. All I can say is, I didn’t regret watching the film. Whether I regret enjoying it is another matter.
It occurred to me watching “Moonfall” that Emmerich is probably the most well-funded conspiracy theorist in entertainment history. If you think about it, Emmerich has often had a soft spot for characters who seem batshit insane, but end up being right. Look at Matthew Broderick in “Godzilla,” Randy Quaid in “Independence Day,” and Woody Harrelson in “2012.” Heck, he even made a film about the long-standing theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write all his plays in “Anonymous.” In “Moonfall,” one of his main characters is a janitor whose wild theories about the moon turn out being true. It’s hard to accuse him of not being on-brand.
“Moonfall” begins with a mission to repair the Hubble telescope in 2011. Astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Mosley (Chris Sandiford) are working on the repairs, with Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry) in the shuttle. An unusual, shapeless blob comes across them, disrupting the mission. Harper gets her and Fowl back to Earth, but what happened sounds crazy, and he is ostracized. Cut to a decade later, and something very unusual is happening with the moon- it’s orbit is decreasing. Is it connected to the events of a decade prior? Maybe more than either Harper or Fowl realize.
The screenplay by Emmerich, Harald Kloser (also a long-time composer for Emmerich) and Spenser Cohen is what happens when you put “Armageddon,” “Ancient Aliens” and “The Matrix” in a blender and start pouring it down audience’s throats. Wait, “The Matrix?” I’m not going to go into too much about the plot, but the janitor mentioned above, a character named KC Houseman (played by “Game of Thrones’s” John Bradley) has a theory about the moon that isn’t as simple as “oh, we didn’t go to it,” but something far more game-changing. If true, it would make the event a decade before a lot more complicated for humanity, not that the moon getting closer to Earth isn’t already complicated enough.
The tropes in “Moonfall” are not dissimilar to the rest of Emmerich’s work, but “Armageddon” feels like the template here. One of the things that annoys me to no end about “Armageddon,” besides the chaos of its filmmaking, is that the characters do not seem to take the situation seriously, which is ridiculous when it comes to the timeline the film puts in front of us. “Moonfall’s” timeline is even more comedically absurd, but never say the characters in this film don’t take it seriously. This results in some hilarious seriousness in the performances, but credit to the actors- they are sincere in their delivery. Bradley is easily the highlight- Wilson and Berry are great stars, but Bradley basically guides the way for how this film should be acted. Not far behind is Donald Sutherland in his greatest performance since “JFK.” I will be taking no questions on that last statement at this moment.
This may be the dullest of Emmerich’s disaster films, and that includes “The Day After Tomorrow.” The action in the film is not terribly exciting, but it is great visual film. There’s a level of world-building, and love of genre, we haven’t seen from the director since “Stargate”- he’s truly making an alternate world here that feels authentic. If the action doesn’t engage us as much, I feel like it has more to do with the fact that the movie is trying to be more about characters than set pieces. There’s only one set piece in the film, when a launch has to occur, where anything memorable occurs, and what’s memorable is the striking visuals that Emmerich and his effects team have conjured. That sequence alone might make “Moonfall” worth checking out. It’s also nonsense that only Roland Emmerich is capable of making entertaining.
