Moonfall: Movie Review

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, John Bradley

Director: Roland Emmerich

Nobody does it like the master of disaster, Roland Emmerich.

He's blown up the White House in Independence Day and taken the planet out with climate change in The Day After Tomorrow - Emmerich's got an eye for a big scale FX-led disaster flick, but sadly no ear for the dialogue that should come with the spectacle.

Emmerich doesn't shake things up in Moonfall, a movie largely predicated on the story that the Moon is moving out of its orbit, is on a collision course with the Earth and only a small team of misfits on a desperate one last hope mission can save the day.

Throw in some talk of Megastructures (courtesy of Sam Tarwell's John Bradley as a seemingly mad conspiracy theorist), emotional threats to a wronged spaceman whose last mission ended badly (Patrick Wilson, affable and untouchable) and his "work wife" whom he saved in space but who's drifted from his pull (Halle Berry, taking it all in her stride), and you've got the trappings of a check-your-brain-at-the-door disaster movie.

It's not rocket science generally, with films like this - but Emmerich, along with his team of writers, decides to inject proceedings with touches of 2001: A Space Odyssey, nanotechnology and enough scifi mumbo jumbo backstory to fuel a prequel (Moonrise, anyone?) meaning this is one overstuffed blockbuster that delivers it all (and yet somehow, nothing) - and keeps its Lexus sponsors happy by having their cars handle exceptionally well in a driving blizzard as bits of stray rock fall explosively to the ground.

Emmerich is about the spectacle, in fairness, and this isn't a film that largely takes itself too seriously early on - thanks to some egregious dialogue ("I don't work for you, I work for the American People" someone says later on), some laugh out loud moments (a call comes in to a mobile from "NASA") and some relatively solid world-building and an imperceptible threat, a “self-aware, self-replicating singularity.”

But the higher the tower is stacked, the looser its foundations begin to feel.

As the hokum levels rise,the growingly goofy threatens to outweigh what's been done - from protestations of John Bradley's Nick Frost-like Dr KC Houseman ("I've got IBS") to Patrick Wilson's increasingly straight delivery of chunks of exposition, Moonfall is a film that falters when it moves away from its excellently executed FX-heavy destruction.

And what there is of that commands to be seen on the big screen. Nobody does destruction like Emmerich - and even if you're hoping for an Armageddon-style revival in the script, at least there are kudos to be had for trying something different and pulling the rug out from under the audience (for reasons too spoilery to divulge here).

Sure, the physics of gravity are iffy here, and the science probably doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but Emmerich doesn't care for long term examination of such matters - it is best to check your brain at the door, dive into a bucket of popcorn and throw your hands up at the tellingly laughable script. 

The issue with Moonfall though isn't that it doesn't fully lean into one thing or the other - it wants desperately to be taken seriously with its pseudo science, but at the same time, it also wants to be a crowdpleasing piece of hokum that sees parts of the moon fall to earth and destroy the world. 

Sorry, Roland, but you can't have both.