(L-R) John Bradley, Patrick Wilson, and Halle Berry star in MOONFALL — Courtesy of Lionsgate
When it comes to disaster movies, it seems no one enjoys making them more than Roland Emmerich. Whether it’s destructive alien invaders (Independence Day), the breaking point for global warming (The Day After Tomorrow), or the end of the Mayan calendar (2012), Emmerich is best known for making big, expensive, movies that are usually, if nothing else, very entertaining.
Now he brings us Moonfall, a big, expensive, silly movie that is very entertaining, even if it isn’t good. But it is an epic disaster movie in which the moon is about to fall on the Earth. Why? No one really knows. One minute, everything was great and fine and the moon was hanging out in its usual orbit. The next, it’s hurtling toward Earth and will hit — as all good movie disasters should — in about three weeks. That doesn’t leave much time for solutions. Except luckily, there is a reason the moon moved and that means there might be a way to fix it. Which is how an interim NASA director, a disgraced former astronaut, and a conspiracy theorist end up flying a decommissioned space shuttle on a mission to literally save the world. Because of course they do.
The script is co-written by Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen. It will get a lot of criticism for its dialogue, which certainly isn’t great. A movie about the moon crashing into the earth should warrant snark, witty one-liners, and a lot of gallows humor. Instead, they opt to play it mostly very straight and serious, which is a big missed opportunity. O the memes we could have had!
There are a lot of things to enjoy about Moonfall. The level of imagination and thought that went into things like moon debris storms, wonky-gravity car chases, sudden tidal shifts, and even the way the math would constantly be changing as the moon’s mass increases led to some delightfully zany sequences that are visually intriguing and also occasionally very funny (although maybe unintentionally). As disaster movies go, this looks cool in all those great and ridiculous ways. Even if this is 100% not at all how science works. Moonfall also captures some of the dumb things humans do. Like watching an astrophysicist try to use a cell phone when all of the cell towers have clearly been taken out by that giant tidal wave. That is probably the most realistic moment in the entire movie. And yet, as I said, it’s fun to watch the disaster unfold.
But the thing about Moonfall is that while it’s fun to watch in the moment, it’s not likely to have a lot of staying power. This is similar in structure to a movie like Emmerich’s most successful, Independent Day. The formula involves meeting our heroes early on in whatever their day-to-day lives currently look like, introducing the danger right away, spending a chunk of time debating what to do about it while every possible idea falls through except the craziest. Meanwhile, our heroes’ family members are scattered far and wide, each trying to get to some kind of safety.
The structure worked in 1996 and it could have worked again here. Except that Moonfall doesn’t do enough to actually develop most of the characters it introduces. Halle Berry plays Jocinda Fowler, a divorced single mom who is an assistant director at NASA but all we really know about her is what we are told. We could never guess that she would have been the type of person to sing karaoke at her wedding because the Jocinda we meet is so stoic and serious and world-weary. We follow along and care about her because we care about Halle Berry. Her ex-husband (played by Eme Ikwuakor) does very little besides mope around and try to believe in Jocinda.
Patrick Wilson’s Brian Harper is also divorced after his firing from NASA derailed his life and left him penniless and estranged from his son Sonny (Charlie Plummer). But Patrick Wilson is too charming and well-kept to convince anyone that he’s three months behind in his rent, doesn’t have a real job, and hasn’t spoken to his son in who-knows-how-long.
And then there is John Bradley who is the best suited to his character, KC Houseman. But in the year 2022, after all we’ve experienced in the real world over the past couple of years, centering an entire movie around an Elon Musk-worshipping conspiracy theorist who turns out to have been right about everything all along is something that deserved a little more careful consideration. Bradley plays the part very well and is the funniest and most delightful thing about the whole experience, and kudos to him for it. It’s still unfortunate timing for such a hero to emerge.
The rest of the cast is peppered with supporting characters like Michael Peña, Kelly Yu, Carolina Bartczak, and Donald Sutherland, among others. Some of them get plenty of screen time but none of them have real characters, which makes it difficult to really care what happens to them, or to feel any degree of loss or satisfaction by the outcome. For a movie like this to really work and to have a long post-theater life, it has to be full of characters you want to root for, moments that make you happen, scenes that leave you feeling emotional.
Moonfall, for all its creative gimmicks and effects, has very little emotional heft. This is one of those movies where, months from now, we’ll still talk about how cool it looked when the gravity kept changing. But we won’t remember a single character’s name. There’s value to big, dumb disaster movies like this. Especially in early February when the world is too serious and the movies are too serious and we just want to have fun. So instead of lamenting what it isn’t, let’s celebrate Moonfall for the dumb fun that it is.
