Moonfall (2022) dares to ask “What would Elon do?” then fails to give us a single character who narcissistically pontificates on social media while ruthlessly exploiting our natural resources/ actual innovators.
Guys, Roland Emmerich really, really, wants to make a galactic war movie. Maybe some studio should just let him so he can get it out of his system. Until that happens, though, we have MOONFALL, Emmerich’s second attempt to kickstart an intergalactic sci-fi franchise after INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE literally and narratively crashed and burned.
In 2011, a routine space shuttle mission to repair a satellite goes disastrously wrong when a mysterious black swarm attacks the vessel, leaving astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) as the only survivors. With Fowler incapacitated during the attack, Harper’s account is refuted and he is fired for his error causing the damage. Ten years later, conspiracy theorist K C Houseman (John Bradley) discovers that the moon’s orbit is deteriorating, taking it as vindication of his lunar megastructure theory but when he attempts to alert the authorities, he’s rebuffed. Once NASA discovers a deep borehole on the surface of the moon, however, Harper seeks Houseman out believing that what threatens the moon now is the same thing that attacked his shuttle a decade before.
You can’t help but feel that MOONFALL is Emmerich raking through the rubble of his shattered dreams for INDEPENDENCE DAY 3, borrowing liberally from Brian De Palma’s millennial misfire MISSION TO MARS and then bundled together with Emmerich’s trademark disaster movie schtick as cinematic duct tape. It never feels particularly cohesive and while the sci-fi the-moon’s-a-megastructure parts are at least interesting and have potential, the by-the-numbers blended family-in-peril earthbound subplot feels tired, trite and tediously contrived to give some unnecessary emotional underpinning to the loony lunar concept at the heart of the film.
What fun there is in the concept is weighed down by poor writing, the same sludgy mud-palate special effects that blighted INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE and gratuitously obvious tokenism that sees the by-now-expected standard-issue Chinese Box Office courting character and not one but two cringe-inducingly sycophantic shout-outs to Elon Musk. Yes, MOONFALL is a film that dares to ask “What Would Elon Do?” and then singularly fails to offer even one character who goes on Joe Rogan to get baked, trades sophomoric abuse on social media and kills monkeys in pursuit of an idea that probably wasn’t even his to begin with.
Berry, Wilson and Peña, all veterans of other less-than-stellar productions do their best but seem flattened by the banal material and it’s only John Bradley’s benign likeability that sees him come through undiminished. His wide-eyed enthusiasm and guileless charm really starts to rehabilitate the image of your typical basement-dwelling Musk-worshipping crackpot conspiracy theorist incel.
The scenes of sky-high tsunami and wanton destruction lack the wit and innovation which used to be Emmerich’s stock-in-trade although it’s interesting to see that even though many cityscapes are laid waste, Freedom Tower in New York is conspicuously still standing by the end of the film. Monuments and edifices which have existed for millennia are fair game, but even Emmerich won’t go there. Sure, there’s fun to be had from the gravitational demolition derby but most of the pleasure the film provides is in the form of schadenfreude knowing just how enraged self-anointed movie pedantry panjandrum Neil deGrasse Tyson is becoming with everyone boneheaded minute that passes. That and the undeniable nostalgia that seeing a space shuttle in action evokes. Back when spaceships were spaceships and not phallic billionaire compensatory peacocking.
In the end, MOONFALL pays too much attention paid to the derivative destruction on Earth and not enough on the nature and genesis of the megastructure moon and its builders, with the details being dumped in a hasty expository preamble to the deus ex machina ending which underwhelms as much as it illuminates.
Like INDEPENDENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, MOONFALL feels like the opening to a better, more exciting story that we’ll never get to see because, in the hurry to get to that chapter, everyone involved forgot to make this chapter worthwhile in and of itself.
