Moonfall (2022)

It’s a sheer coincidence that, in the last four months, I’ve reviewed four movies dealing with the impending destruction of the Earth. The first three — Don’t Look Up, Warning from Space, and When Worlds Collide — dealt with various types of astral bodies on a collision course with our planet. In the most recent movie, Moonfall, our own moon is the threat.

In 2011, astronauts Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) were involved in a strange incident involving the space shuttle Endeavor and a swarm of metallic objects. A fellow astronaut is killed when the swarm attacks the shuttle. Harper manages to get the shuttle back to Earth, saving Fowler, who was knocked unconscious. Upon their return to Earth, Harper is blamed for the death of the third astronaut. No one believes his claim that something came out of the moon and attacked them. Worse yet, Fowler doesn’t stand up for the man who saved her life.

Fast forward to present day. Conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) calculates that the moon’s orbit has changed and it will crash into the Earth in three weeks. He theorizes that the moon is a “megastructure,” some sort of alien construction built around a star. NASA ignores his calls, so he contacts the disgraced Harper to help him get his message through. Meanwhile, NASA scientists have already confirmed that the moon is on a collision course with the Earth. They try to suppress the information until the government can come up with a plan. Seeing no action from NASA, Houseman leaks the information to the press, which causes an immediate panic.

Somehow, NASA has to fix the moon’s orbit before it strikes Earth. Of course, Houseman’s outlandish theory may hold the only solution to correcting the moon’s deadly course. And, you can bet Fowler and Harper will be forced to work together and overcome their differences.

The concept of the moon being an alien spaceship careening out of control is a good one. It provides a plethora of opportunities for widespread destruction and outlandish action sequences. If nothing else, director Roland Emmerich’s movies always have tons of action. They may strain the boundaries of believability but that’s not unexpected at all.

Emmerich has given us plenty of big budget disaster movies. 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Independence Day immediately come to mind. He’s also given us a few movie disasters. Namely, Godzilla and 10,000 B.C. Moonfall follows a similar template as those aforementioned films. It’s big, loud, virtually nonsensical, and full of computer-generated mayhem.

However, the script  — by Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen — just throws too many characters into the mix. For example, Brian Harper isn’t just a disgraced astronaut falsely accused of being responsible for the death of a crew member. He also has a miscreant son who’s recently been thrown in jail. He has an ex-wife with an obnoxious new husband. That’s a lot of subplots for one character. Unfortunately, Fowler also has an ex-spouse and a child that factor into the plot. Worse yet, all of these extraneous characters all play some integral role at just the right time. One could chalk that up to Moonfall just being a mindless good time if it didn’t fire up an expositional spitball in the third act that describes a scenario that looks like a much better movie.

I knew going in that Moonfall would be dumb. I was fully prepared for the movie equivalent of a lobotomy for two hours. That’s the Roland Emmerich modus operandi. But when the scriptwriters show that they’re perfectly capable of creating an interesting plot and yet they reduce it to a five minute flashback with narration provided by a child? It was just the breaking point. That’s when I couldn’t suspend my disbelief anymore. That is, the disbelief that Emmerich and his team couldn’t come up with anything better than what they passed off as the plot of a $140 million movie. It’s just too dumb.