Directed by:
Roland EmmerichCinematography:
Robby BaumgartnerCast:
Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Charlie Plummer, Kelly Yu, Michael Peña, Donald Sutherland, Eme Ikwuakor, Carolina Bartczak, Maxim Roy (more)VOD (2)
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In Roland Emmerich’s 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 (Halle Berry) is convinced she has the key to saving us all, but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), and a conspiracy theorist, KC Houseman (John Bradley), believe her. The unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is. (Entertainment in Video)
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It has a bit of an Independence Day 2 feel. I like Emmerich, he handles the VFX attractions well, but the rest is noticeably inferior to the competition. I found everything here to be incredibly rushed forward (it's quite a ironic that Don't Look Up was able to present the threat in a much more interesting, exacerbated and intense way), which is a shame, I believe with a strong background this could have been very good. At the same time it's a shame that Emmerich had to mix in artificial intelligence and aliens, in other circumstances I would have welcomed it, but here the threat of the moon alone would have been enough to give the whole thing a more serious feel. It's cheesy and quite entertaining, but it's a shame that the destruction itself takes a while. 5.5/10.
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In terms of price and performance, Roland Emmerich has already destroyed the planet several times in a much better way and with a nicer humanistic furor. This incel-conspiracy vision is fine as long as it plays by the rules of a disaster film, but then my brain was skipping out on this attempt at lobotomized sci-fi. It should have ended up on Netflix, because I haven't seen such ugly green-screens on the big screen in a long time. Being able to put the laundry in the washing machine and look out the window would only have added to the film. I don’t expect much from Emmerich, but certainly something more fun than Moonfall.
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Since Moonfall's script could not have been devised by even the most consummate conspiracy theorist, there can be no doubt that the filmmakers are not serious. In my opinion, this is a deliberate contribution to the category of not perhaps intentionally stupid, but logic-ignoring and the most insane fear-mongering B-movies of the 50s, 60s or 70s, which pretended to be serious, but were mainly concerned with entertaining the audience and packing cinemas. This is exactly the feeling I had, much stronger than in all of Emmerich's previous efforts. I like his work, but the films that stand out interestingly are 10,000 BC and Midway, which I liked the least by far. Why? Because Emmerich wanted to deliver a serious story on the one hand and a big visual effects spectacle on the other, but the combination didn't work. At the same time, a serious story without lavish effects can certainly be made (The Patriot, Anonymous) as well as overblown visual effects spectacles that don't take themselves seriously, whether they're about saving or destroying our world or another, or just a proper 80s school action flick (the, in my opinion, underrated White House Down). This time he dispensed with the need for any seriousness altogether, coming up with a wacky but really unorthodox plot that allowed him to destroy a bit more and differently than what and how he had been destroying so far. The plot is heavily condensed, a couple of days go by without warning between several scenes, during which something important happens that other films would spend more time on, and meanwhile the giant moon is approaching the Earth, constantly rising and setting, doing doggy stunts with gravity that make many scenes really crazy and funny. For example, the naivety with which they travel back and forth from Earth and solve individual problems is almost Meliés-like. You watch it with a smile, see how nice it looks, enjoy the truly original design of the monster... If I like the naive films that this reminded me of, then I have no reason not to like Moonfall.
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A mix of Independence Day and 2012, but it can’t hold a candle to either. Sure, this is primarily light entertainment, or classic Emmerich, if you will, though even lighter than usual because it’s worse than even Godzilla in character work, dialogue and level of stupidity, and that's saying a hell of a lot. Surprisingly, even the visual effects flourishes don't dazzle to any extreme, and the once so inventive wizard has fallen into the average green screen, where he greases up one unimaginative make-up scene after another. What would Elon do? I'm sure he wouldn't have made this occasionally funny travesty.
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In Moonfall, there is not even a trace of anything that made last year’s The Tomorrow War, a B-movie in the same genre, so great (inventive work with clichés, sincere emotions, nice visual stylization). Emmerich disappeared into a black hole. This can’t be his movie. Or maybe he's just realizing that he has nothing left to say after 2012. An Asylum screenplay with an A-list cast. I still can’t believe that I saw Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry reciting that dialogue.
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