Moonfall

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D

              Following a musical and a Christian film in recent months, here is another genre that I don’t particularly like: disaster movies. And they don’t usually make them like this anymore. Well, except for one guy. Director Roland Emmerich has attempted to destroy the planet enough times to qualify as a Superman villain (his prior films include Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 & Independence Day: Resurgence) and returns again to wreak CGI destruction upon the Earth with Moonfall. On one hand, you almost have to admire the man’s determination to still pump out movies like this, with budgets in excess of $150 million, when the public clearly isn’t interested anymore (you might notice the downward trajectory in popularity of the films that I listed earlier). That’s a level of artistic stubbornness that I can oddly respect in a way. On the other hand, Moonfall is a ridiculous film that somehow manages to be both painfully cliché and absolutely bonkers at the same time. I also oddly respect that in a way. The movie still sucks, though.

               We begin with Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry as astronauts working in outer space to do astronaut-like things. Their mission is interrupted when a cloud of black CGI goo attacks Wilson and kills the third astronaut that shall remain nameless because I’m not bothering to look him up. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, NASA assumes that Wilson made up the aggressive space blob and he is fired. A decade later, we meet a conspiracy theorist that believes that the moon is an artificial megastructure that was constructed by intelligent life. I’m not even going to Google that theory because it’s so fucking stupid that I’ll just assume that there are people that actually believe it. Anyway, this nutjob discovers that the moon is out of orbit and forces NASA to acknowledge this fact by leaking it onto social media. The moon’s diverting orbit then causes the usual disaster movie stuff: meteors crashing, massive flooding, etc.

               Let’s pause with the plot here for a moment before addressing the descent into madness that is the last half hour of this movie. For about the first 90 minutes of its 2-hour+ running time, Moonfall almost plays like a parody of 90s-era disaster movies except that it is merely reproducing all of those tropes without any sense of self-awareness. Let’s go down the checklist, shall we? Disgraced former hero that is redeemed when he emerges to save the day? Check. The hero has a strained relationship with a love interest because of something in his tortured past? Check. Scientists that come up with a solution, but have to fight with military guys that just want to nuke everything? Check. A family that resolves their differences in the face of certain destruction? Check. If you locked a team of monkeys in a room, forced them to watch 90s disaster movies for a day and then chucked a typewriter at them, they could produce the script for 80% of Moonfall in about 24 hours. This is a movie where somebody actually says the line “This planet has suffered five extinctions. This is going to be the sixth.” Even the fucking monkeys would call that hackneyed bullshit.

               But those monkeys took some serious acid before writing the ending of this movie, so let’s get into SPOILERS for a minute. It turns out that billions of years ago (and in a galaxy far, far away) ancient descendants of humans once became so technologically advanced that they created artificial intelligence that became self-aware and decided to destroy humanity. So, yes, they created Skynet. And yes, I’m still describing the plot of Moonfall. So when these ancient space humans were being threatened with extinction at the hands of their own creation, they created the moon (!), powered it with a white dwarf (?) and sent it off into the universe to allow humanity to develop elsewhere (??). That black CGI blob from the beginning of the movie was a manifestation of the artificial intelligence, which has tracked us down and is going to kill us by screwing with the moon.

               I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, because the plot of Moonfall is the sort of thing that I dwell upon while people assume that I’m pondering something serious, and I’ve got nothing. On one level, I don’t understand how the entire manufactured-moon plan worked. On another level, all of these revelations are so out of fucking nowhere that it feels like the ending of a different film. It would be like watching Armageddon, getting to the end of the movie and finding out that the asteroid was sent toward Earth by dinosaurs that time-traveled to the future to destroy humanity. I’m really torn on it because it does introduce something different (albeit insane) to the disaster-movie formula. On the other hand, it is introduced so late into the movie that it feels completely out of place. My mom went to see this movie with me because, for some reason, she loves disaster movies. Once the aliens stuff kicked in, she turned to me and said “whoever heard of such a thing?” That question made me realize two things: 1. The ending of this movie doesn’t work and 2. My mom doesn’t understand the basic tenets of science fiction.

               Moonfall is 2/3s mind-numbingly boring and 1/3 amusingly ridiculous. If a cross between Deep Impact and 2001: A Space Odyssey sounds like it’s up your alley, then, by all means, this movie can kill a couple of hours for you. If that sounds stupid, and/or you don’t like disaster movies to begin with, then feel free to leave these movies behind in the late 90s with JNCO jeans and nu-metal.

Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonfall_(film)#/media/File:Moonfall2022Poster.jpg