Moonfall review: A disaster movie in every sense
Halle Berry deserves better than this wreck of a sci-fi disaster movie about the moon hurtling towards Earth
As a wise bard once wrote, if you get caught between the moon and New York City, the best that you can do is fall in love. Not bad advice for the hapless citizens of Earth destined to be obliterated by the planet’s imminent impact with the moon in Roland Emmerich’s preposterous Moonfall (★☆☆☆☆).
More precisely, the moon is the celestial body flying mysteriously off its orbit. Something or somebody has propelled Earth’s natural satellite on a trajectory to slam into our fragile blue planet, wreaking tidal and seismic havoc, and spinning off mountain-sized chunks of moon rock as the lunar mass careens ever closer.
Christopher Cross should get a kick seeing a film dramatize his memorable love song lyric so literally, in CGI scenes of New York City torn asunder, the Chrysler Building’s iconic spire whizzing across the screen.
L.A. gets hit, too, in the Independence Day filmmaker’s inauspicious return to big-budget disaster territory, but no one in the film seems to care about the massive tsunami that washes over Hollywood. That could be scathing social commentary, or just lazy writing, since these characters tend not to mourn any loss of life.
Halle Berry’s plucky Jocinda Fowler, the acting director of NASA, and Patrick Wilson’s maverick astronaut Brian Harper are too busy banging their heads together coming up with outlandish missions to stop the moon from falling out of the sky and into the Colorado Rockies.
They even commandeer the decommissioned Space Shuttle Endeavour for a hail-mary mission to outer space. That they’re able to get the old museum piece from L.A. to a launch pad in Colorado, gassed and ready to launch in a mere matter of hours is the sort of yeah-whatever-let’s-just-go-with-it development that’s par for the course in the half-baked script by Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen. Although nothing could be as half-baked as the jumble of pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, and sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that constitute the ultimate extraterrestrial explanation for the moon’s calamitous fall.
Actually, the visual effects, often the hallmark of Emmerich’s movies, look half-baked much of the time. Despite the occasional striking tableau of, say, a blood-orange moon looming like a colossus on the horizon, the visual elements don’t inspire much wonder at the enormous scale of the events being depicted. In one scene, amateur astronomer KC Houseman (John Bradley, better known as Game of Thrones‘ Samwell Tarly) gazes in awe at a sight we barely glimpse for a second before he soliloquizes about it at length.
And the millions and millions of gray-ish pixels forming towering waves, toppling buildings, and swirling space debris rarely gather any real sense of weight or tangibility. Likewise, the movie lends little gravity or dimension to the human toll taken by the catastrophic onslaught of floods, fires, and earthquakes. Maybe that’s the real commentary, intended or not: the human element is missing from blockbuster cinema.
Certainly the characters and their respective portfolios of dramatic backstory feel mishandled. Berry and Wilson both have done far better work elsewhere, with Wilson particularly unconvincing as “the only one” who can lead this mission/land this shuttle/look into the heart of darkness and make it out alive, or whatever else he’s literally the only person on the planet capable of doing.
As conspiracy-touting NASA wannabe Houseman, the first to spot impending disaster, Bradley limns the most persuasive performance of the three leads. The mama’s boy, besides helpfully spouting sci-fi exposition, is clearly intended as comic relief, yet the only really funny thing he adds to the proceedings is a cat named Fuzz Aldrin.
The remainder of the characters generally fall into one-note categories of “general who must be ignored,” “government official who must be defied,” or “loved one who must be saved.”
Unfortunately for Jocinda’s ex, Doug (Eme Ikwuakor), a four-star general with his finger on the trigger of potentially world-saving nukes, not everyone makes the must-be-saved list. With disaster bearing down, their little boy Jimmy (Zayn Maloney) laments to mom, “We’ll never make it to Dad.” She just smiles serenely and says, “That’s okay.” There’s your comic relief.
Or the scene where Donald Sutherland, as enigmatic government archivist Holdenfield, keeper of the nation’s darkest state secrets, discovers someone snooping through his top secret files, insists they don’t have clearance, then, seeing a flash of a security badge, proceeds to blab all the secrets he’s been holding for the last half a century.
Holdenfield also doesn’t seem the slightest bit bothered by the coming apocalypse — almost like he’s seen that movie before, and figures that somebody will think of something before it all comes to an end.
Moonfall is Rated PG-13 and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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