Moonfall

Roland Emmerich's latest disaster film crashes to Earth with a damp thud.

At this point in his career, director Roland Emmerich’s name has become practically synonymous with the big-budget disaster blockbuster. I won’t waste ink listing his entire filmography, but nearly 40 percent of his directorial work is made up of disaster movies—a few of them, like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, being among the most iconic titles of the genre.

This makes Moonfall, his latest attempt to destroy the world on-screen, something of a wonder. Not in itself—the film is a mostly lifeless and vapid exercise in how to expensively waste acting talent—but in the context of his previous work and reputation, it stands out as shockingly, confusingly inept.

Don’t get me wrong: Emmerich has plenty of stinkers to his name, even within the genre. A bad Emmerich film, in and of itself, is not out of the norm. What's surprising about Moonfall is how straightforward it is—how cleanly it adheres to the basic tenets of an Emmerich end-of-the worlder (which, mind you, have proven a popular and lucrative formula for the disaster movie)—and how, in spite of that, it displays a total lack of handling on how to build tension or elicit a visceral sense of stakes.

Patrick Wilson plays disgraced astronaut Brian Harper, who was cast out of the United States space program as a result of a mission that went catastrophically wrong on his watch, killing a fellow astronaut. His partner, Jo Fowler (Halle Berry), escaped blame for being unconscious at the time. She’s now top-dog at NASA.

But Brian knows that something otherworldly happened on that mission—something he’s been unable to explain to anyone since. Unfortunately, he lacks any evidence of the angry, metallic space-cloud which he witnessed assault them and then crash-land on the Moon.

Brian finds an unexpected believer in KC Houseman (John Bradley), a conspiracy nut and megastructurist who happens to be impersonating him at a seminar that Brian is supposed to be giving to elementary school students at the local observatory. As it turns out, KC has made a massive discovery, by illegally snooping through a professor’s research at UC Irvine: the Moon’s orbit has been mysteriously shrinking, drawing it closer and closer to Earth.

Meanwhile, Jo’s team at NASA is making the same discovery and is scrambling to come up with a plan to prevent (or at least survive) a lunar impact. The whistle is blown when KC publishes the revelation online, and the world is thrown into a frenzy. Shortly thereafter, coastal cities all over the world are hit by tsunamis, as Earth’s biggest satellite draws closer, inflicting its growing gravitational force on the planet.

If I remember the film correctly, that's all in… the first 20-25 minutes? And that’s on top of family-drama subplots being established for each of the three leads, which include an ex-wife who remarried a car salesman, an estranged rebel son, a mother being overtaken by dementia, a husband who’s a 4-star general with opposing views of how to address the lunar issue, and more. The film is packed to the lid with stakes, both personal and global, but Emmerich can’t manage to give any of them enough time or weight to make them feel worth even their thinly spread screen time, especially when they have to compete with the expected abundance of landscape shots showcasing the destruction.

After being granted top-level security clearance, Jo finds enough evidence, thanks to a “what is he doing here?” cameo from Donald Sutherland, to corroborate Brian’s moon-cloud story. She convinces him and KC to join her on a mission to space to destroy whatever is causing the Moon’s fall to Earth.

The film jumps back and forth from the A-plot—Brian, KC, and Jo making further discoveries about the moon-cloud—and the B—their families, getting caught in a mad rush to evacuate inland to the mountains. This is all fine, I guess, until the space plot becomes immensely more interesting than watching Brian’s son fight off, for the third time in 20 minutes, the same cartoonishly evil redneck bandits who’ve been inexplicably following him through the snow.

And hardly a single moment in all of this is given more than the bare-minimum time in execution. Would-be critical character moments and plot developments are introduced and concluded within seconds. Major turns in the plot’s momentum are resolved in a 20-second conversation, with little more than a cheap one-liner or a closeup of the focal characters’ aloof reactions to articulate the “significance” of what happened. It’s bizarre that Emmerich, THE guy known for, well, not much besides disaster movies, displays such poor understanding of how to properly ratchet up tension and pay it off.

One small credit I can lend Moonfall is its twist—because frankly, it’s a pretty good one. It’s not that it’s super shocking or mind-blowing, but it is, conceptually, more high-minded than could be expected of this film, based on how dry and hackneyed every single other element of the story is. I actually admired the reveal and how it affects KC’s and Brian’s characters.

But it’s also that third-act reveal in space which makes the Earthbound side of things even more painfully drab than they already were. While we watch, in some mild semblance of awe, as our heroes enter the Moon’s crust and uncover its well-rendered extraterrestrial secrets, we’re frequently interrupted so we can watch Brian’s and Jo’s family trudge through snow in the Colorado Rockies as they get chased by unbelievably bloodthirsty hillbillies. The B-plot simply doesn’t rise to meet the A, especially when we’re given so little depth for each of these supporting players.

As for the spectacle—the “Emmerich of it all”—I just can’t imagine anyone who’s seen Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, or even 2012 being impressed with anything shown here. Sure, you’ve got the gravity effects as the new destructive gimmick, wherein the Moon scrapes so close to the Earth that it starts yanking stuff off the ground, before dropping it all back down to Earth as it passes by in its orbit. That’s neat, I guess. But that dynamic is never integrated into any of the setpieces in a memorable way.

There’s no “time’s up” scene here, in which we get to see people—actual people—get suddenly obliterated by the disaster, while buildings and infrastructure are intricately ripped apart onscreen. It’s just vague, distant CGI shots of waves hitting buildings and pieces of iconic skyscrapers getting swept into the sky as the Moon floats by overhead. The film’s large-scale destruction is almost entirely detached from the humanity of it.

Moonfall skirts by as nearly passable in that it’s never intellectually offensive, nor is it a particularly painful experience, as long as you don’t daydream too hard about what it could have been. But it is, above all else, utterly forgettable. Even Wilson doesn’t get the chance to be particularly likable—something he’s remarkably good at, even in the most under-written roles.

I wouldn’t watch Moonfall again, even to laugh at it, because it’s not laughably bad. It’s just boringly bad.

And that’s a shame, because the Moon crashing to Earth is honestly the perfect sort of dumbass premise for an over-the-top destruct-a-thon like this. And Emmerich is, or should be, the guy for the job! But this is not the Emmerich of disasters past. This is an Emmerich who’s utterly lost touch with all but the most superficial elements of his past contributions to the genre. This disaster movie, for lack of a more tactful takedown, lacks gravity.