The most recent entry in writer-director Roland Emmerich’s disaster-verse wears its influences on its sleeve and not in a good way. “Moonfall” is just a worse version – in almost every quantifiable aspect – of the many disaster films that precede it. It’s almost like the objective was to make an end-of-the-world movie that was mostly devoid of the genre’s strengths. Emmerich’s latest replaces gripping action and thrilling intensity with boring characters and a lackluster story.
Adding insult to injury, “Moonfall,” which boasted a $140 million budget, earned a measly $10 million during its opening weekend, making it the biggest box office flop of the year up until this point.
The well-known disaster artist (i.e., “Independence Day,” The Day After Tomorrow.”) taps Oscar-winner Halle Berry, horror-legend Patrick Wilson, and “Game of Thrones” alum John Bradley to play our mismatched band of heroes who have to – spoiler alert – stop the moon from falling. In just under three weeks, mind you.
“Moonfall” opens in space as a pair of veteran astronauts – Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) – work with a rookie space traveler named Marcus (Frank Fiola) on a routine satellite repair operation. Their playful banter is violently interrupted by a sentient black swarm of mysterious “space dust,” which effectively derails the mission and kills Marcus. The entirety of this introduction is basically just a Great Value rendition of Alfonso Cuarón’s mind-blowing 17-minute take from “Gravity.”
The bulk of the story then comes in the wake of this initial moment. Harper is subsequently blamed for the incident after the NASA higher-ups refuse to believe him and cite his negligence as the primary reason for the significant failure.
Ten years later, Fowler has risen up the ranks at NASA while Harper has become a washed-up has-been who is drowning in vacate notices. Despite the bad blood, the two former friends put their past behind them and work together to pull off the impossible.
Oh, and along the way, they find a replacement for Marcus – R.I.P. to a real one – in K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), a wacky conspiracy theorist who thinks the moon is actually a hollow “mega-structure.”
Unfortunately, each main character is given incredibly boilerplate backstories and the film never dives deep enough into any one of them to make the audience care. Harper’s wife left him, and his son is a delinquent, Fowler works with her divorced husband and Houseman has a deep attachment to his mother who struggles with memory loss. Emmerich plays with themes of family, sacrifice, and redemption but never commits past their surface level and instead opts for quantity over quality.
Few films can feel both long-winded and rushed simultaneously. Yet “Moonfall” is able to execute this to perfection. The pacing is all over the place and it leaves the audience confused, not because it’s thought-provoking, but instead because its use of exposition is inherently flawed.
One minute the news is breaking about the impending catastrophe and in the next a joint agreement between several countries to land on the moon is already underway. This occurs with very little explanation on how the plot moved from point A to point B and also fails to indicate how much time has passed between the two moments. Conversely, the film spends a ridiculous amount of time on setting and constantly reiterating the stakes – which are relatively straightforward to begin with.
“What’s the plan?” Fowler asks an hour and 45 minutes into its two-hour runtime.
“Save the moon. Save Earth.” Harper emphatically replies.
In addition to that, side characters and subplots lack depth and are either used as obvious plot devices or meaningless additions to an already overwhelming ensemble of bland characters. A particularly notable example of this is through Fowler’s encounter with Holdenfield (Donald Sutherland), a former NASA scientist turned disheveled hermit.
He randomly appears from the backroom of a confidential facility in a wheelchair, gives Fowler information regarding a NASA cover-up and then just wheels back into the darkness never to be heard from again. His cameo is nothing but an exposition-laden dialogue dump. The film teases this scandal for seemingly no reason other than to fill in the earlier plot hole for why NASA so adamantly refused to believe Harper in the beginning.
That being said, “Moonfall” isn’t completely lacking in the entertainment department, despite that entertainment coming at the expense of sensical writing.
When the dialogue isn’t bogged down by overly technical scientific jargon there are moments of genuine humor, albeit seemingly unintentional and almost always cringe.
Here are just a few examples (without context) of the hilarious one-liners that can be heard throughout “Moonfall.”
“Go to hell Tom.”
“Yeah, you know what? You go to outer space.”
“Everything we thought we knew about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window.”
“What would Elon [Musk] do?”
Although memorable action set pieces are, for the most part, lacking, Emmerich does introduce a new calamity called a “gravity wave,” which provides some much-needed excitement in the latter half of the film. A dangerous symptom of the moon’s sudden shift in orbit causes earthquakes, mass flooding, flying debris, and as the name suggests a drastic change in gravity. In an unassuming family SUV, Harper’s son (Charlie Plummer) evades hurtling 18 wheelers with ease, drifts past flaming rocks, and pulls off a stunt that would make even Dom from “The Fast and the Furious” look like a safe driver.
Obviously “Moonfall” was never going to be the next “Moonlight” and that’s okay (no one expected it to). That being said, the forgettable performances and predictable plotlines were just too much for the absurd premise and occasional humor to overcome. Maybe “Don’t Look Up” wasn’t so bad after all…