Review: Moonfall
It’s a strange time for a proudly ridiculous throwback like Moonfall to enjoy a nationwide theatrical run. Braving Omicron in a deserted Palm Springs multiplex to watch Roland Emmerich’s latest was a surreal experience. I can’t say I was in the mood for it, but as a cartoonish greatest hits collection of the disaster genre’s most notable clichés, it pummeled me into submission with its goofy positivity and refreshing lack of self-consciousness. This would make a perfect double feature with G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra—Stephen Sommers being the spiritual twin of Emmerich’s who’s more interested in corporeal monsters, whereas Emmerich is all about landmasses going boom. Their films are laden with pretty, thinly-characterized protagonists and a constant deluge of CGI, all with a reach that charmingly exceeds their grasp.
It occurred to me while watching Moonfall that I was continuing a lifelong journey with Emmerich’s films. When Stargate came out I was 8 years old, and rolling from that into the effects milestone Independence Day, then onward to Godzilla and The Patriot, I found comfort in both the scale of the carnage (Emmerich has to have killed a trillion people onscreen by now) and in the reassuring archetypical simplicity of the story and characters. I probably aged out of his moviemaking brand around college, but I did give Independence Day: Resurgence a whirl back in 2016. I think the world changed and his audience shifted, but Emmerich remained the same.
Moonfall opens with some ID4 callbacks over studio logos, with gravitas-inducing grainy stock footage implying a sinister undercurrent to the Apollo moon landing. There is an outer space prologue evocative of Gravity and Ad Astra, during which astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) are doing a routine repair of a satellite. It isn’t long before they are attacked by a cloud of nanites. Their redshirt colleague is killed in the fracas, and Wilson’s character is blamed for the tragedy. A decade’s long time jump returns us to Brian after his fall from grace in NASA, and we’re treated to the least convincing “down on his luck and behind on rent” portrayal in cinema history.
Jo, meanwhile, has ascended to NASA Deputy Director, where she discovers the moon’s orbit is coming worryingly close to earth at about the same time InfoWars-esque K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) figures this out on his own. As the moon draws closer, a potpourri of weather events and devastation rendered about as well as you’d expect in an Emmerich film knocks our heroes around. A shuttle of astronauts is sent to drop a probe into the moon’s core, but they too are taken out by nanites. Ultimately, K.C. and Brian team up with Jo to take a low-tech voyage into the moon to discover the origins of the entity attacking Earth.
As usually happens with these movies, the more outlandish the revelations become, the more fun the experience becomes. For that reason, the movie truly peaks in its third act. An almost fully animated sequence in which an AI explains to Brian precisely why the moon has been out of whack, and why a space cloud is attacking the astronauts, evokes Alex Proyas’ Knowing in its ludicrous journey through time. I was halfway expecting to have the caption “THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE” flash across the screen, and I mean that appreciatively. When Emmerich finally pulls the curtain back, he doesn’t settle for the mundane explanation and instead goes for the mega one, and Moonfall is a richer experience because of it.
The cast is well-utilized and stick to their usual shtick despite the manifest weaknesses in the script. John Bradley channels his Game of Thrones character Sam Tarly again (now with an Adderall power-up), and gets to perform the finale’s most heroic act. Wilson and Berry get to be hot while playing the material with dead seriousness, which is the perfect mode for this film. The supporting cast, filled with ringers like Michael Peña, is deployed in a manner similar to the Independence Day films—embarking on post-apocalyptic side quests against a ticking clock in which their small acts of courage and self-sacrifice parallel the more Herculean efforts of the main stars. An especially fun example of this involves Brian’s son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) evading a roving gang of thugs who just can’t let another day pass where they don’t steal someone’s lunch money.
Moonfall wouldn’t be the first or even third type of movie I turn to in these times of profound anxiety, sadness and existential dread, but on its own terms it succeeds pretty spectacularly. It stands on its own by not being derived from pre-existing IP and isn’t intended as a glorified trailer for another film as part of a longer cycle (as is Marvel’s habit). It’s a “popcorn movie” in the most old-school sense of the term, executed with just enough artfulness to carve out a unique space. It’s a return to form for Emmerich. My 8-year-old self would be most pleased.
