moonfall - Review
A dull disaster movie by a once-great director.
Moonfall will debut in theaters on Feb. 4, 2022.
In Moonfall, the latest film from disaster movie emperor Roland Emmerich, every remarkable idea is presented unremarkably. It’s a hodgepodge of retread ground, with less humanity and artistry than Emmerich is known for, all stitched together in mechanical and uninspired fashion.
The premise is everything you could want from the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. The moon has been knocked out of orbit, causing global calamity. Some conceptually unique aliens might be involved. The only people who can save us are a pair of disgraced astronauts and a lonely conspiracy theorist (lest we forget, Emmerich also directed Anonymous, a conspiracy-based period film), and as the moon approaches Earth’s atmosphere, gravity goes all loopy. However, the version of Moonfall that exists in the imagination, based on its various trailers and synopses, is much more delightful, intriguing, and awe-inspiring than what ends up on screen.
Two hours may seem like enough runtime to set things in motion, but the film’s first half hour is spent on introductions, several enormous time skips, and subsequent re-introductions, all in service of slowly and painstakingly setting up countless estranged relationships meant to function as the movie’s emotional core. Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) was kicked out of NASA for claiming a kaleidoscopic, mechanical being knocked his ship off course before heading for the lunar surface. He's now divorced from his wife Brenda (Carolina Bartczak), his teenage son Sonny (Charlie Harper) is a screw-up, and his wife’s new husband Tom (Michael Peña) is a Lexus salesman, whose sole purpose is to ensure various Lexus logos are visible on screen. Jo Fowler (Halle Berry), Harper’s old teammate, was turned against him and contributed to his firing. She’s divorced too, from her high-ranking military husband Doug (Eme Ikwuakor), whose face seems permanently bent into a scowl, and she now lives with her young son Jimmy (Zayn Maloney) and a Chinese exchange student, Michelle (Kelly Yu).
Wilson and Berry are movie stars through and through, and there’s something enjoyable about watching them approach broad and schmaltzy dialogue with such conviction. The dulcet tones of Wilson’s voice sound especially alluring when they boom through IMAX speakers. The two A-listers almost make Moonfall worth watching, but no one around them is even nearly on their level — with one exception — and the film often cuts away from their central mission, back to their supporting family members trying to outrun dangers elsewhere, each time the larger action threatens to get interesting. The aforementioned exception is both the awkward, comedy-relief third wheel to Wilson and Berry’s reconciliation drama, and the secret heart of the film: K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), a fast-talking internet conspiracy theorist hastily roped up in the world-saving antics, and a man out to prove his doubters wrong and make his sickly mother proud. He’s an oddly fitting action hero for the age of QAnon and flat-Earther-ism, though his beliefs are also fringe enough to avoid these uncomfortable comparisons, and Bradley paints the character with a wonderfully sympathetic charm.
The vague notion that all these people, hovering just outside each other’s orbits, need to mend their relationships in their dying hour and come together faster than the moon hits the Earth, is not altogether unworkable. However, it falls victim to some truly baffling filmmaking decisions, where every shot meant to accentuate the drama feels like the wrong one, and every cut feels determined solely by a computer with no human input. It moves both too quickly and not quickly enough, skipping hastily from beat to beat, but lacking any narrative urgency while taking ages to land on anything resembling real human emotion (aside from Bradley, who’s a treat in every moment). While the music by Thomas Wander and co-screenwriter/producer Harald Kloser has hints of inspiration, it’s usually obscured by the explosive sound mix, so it ends up being of little use.
Little of this would be a major issue if the main attraction were halfway functional, but the spectacle is all similarly dull. There’s rarely a sense of scale to the disaster, let alone a sense of human toll. Everything feels far away, and nothing feels immediate. Every bit of empty CGI mayhem feels cobbled together at the last minute — Hollywood’s overworked effects artists are the real heroes — resulting in interchangeable wide shots of metropolitan destruction that resemble goopy clay miniatures, only they lack the homemade charm. Once the heroes venture into outer space, the film finally has a chance to fine-tune its visual and narrative focus (albeit using ideas that feel leftover from Independence Day: Resurgence), but it keeps getting yanked back to the barely visible catastrophe unfolding on Earth, concealed by nighttime fog and weighed down by supporting characters who are neither nuanced enough to feel like real people, nor broad or self-aware enough to feel like genre pastiche.
Everything Emmerich has executed brilliantly in the past feels incomplete here.
It also has an ending that, while presented as a novel victory, is secretly horrifying, but to dissect it would first mean listing its entire third-act exposition dump, which is delivered in a shockingly boring environment and drawn from various 20th century conspiracy texts. Granted, there isn’t a moment during which Moonfall takes these ideas seriously — if anything, its approach to conspiracy is surprisingly whimsical — which at least results in the saving grace of having Bradley’s character safe in his own narrative bubble, far away from any dangers of the film leaning into real-world ugliness. Unfortunately, little else about Moonfall feels real either, from its emotions to its large-scale pandemonium. Everything Emmerich has executed brilliantly and unapologetically in the past feels tepid and incomplete here. The result is a mere shadow of much better films.
